Hitting the right note: Using AI to extract health data from sound

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Matt Pinney at Marks & Clerk explains how a Cambridge-based company is using artificial intelligence to extract health data from sound.

Five years ago, University of Cambridge alumnus Roeland Decorte started attending “Enterprise Tuesday” a termly talk delivered by the Cambridge Judge Business School’s Entrepreneurship Centre. Wind the clock forward and Roeland was back at the Judge Business School in February on a panel of industry experts discussing the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare to share his experiences, having solo founded Decorte Future Industries which have developed an AI tool to extract health data directly from sound.

AI healthcare revolution

The Cambridge-based company Decorte Future Industries turns sound into complex medical information. Since 2019, the company has been building entirely novel AI that enables the identification and monitoring of human health conditions from audio collected by standard microphones - like those present in most consumer electronics.

This means that the technology can identify whether or not you have, for example, a cardiovascular condition, to the same medical standard as a gold-standard ECG performed in a hospital, using only sound captured by a standard microphone and without the need for electrodes, wires or gel.

Using the same audio collected by the same low-cost microphone, health data such as heart rate, respiratory rate, gastrointestinal sounds, arrhythmias, and coughs can be detected and analysed into cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, psychological and other human health markers. The technology enables continuous out-of-hospital monitoring and significantly increases early diagnostic and disease prevention options for doctors. 

Once validated and deployed, the one sensor method of health data gathering and analysis, with microphones being ubiquitous and extremely low cost, can dramatically increase global access to healthcare (such as through smartphones), enabling remote and continuous health data gathering and analysis at an immense and previously impossible scale.

AI is changing the future of all industries, but as reported in the Marks & Clerk AI Report 2023, the medical technology (medtech) sector is surging ahead. The number of AI-based medtech patent applications published each year has almost quadrupled since 2018. But most strikingly, as a standalone sector, the year-on-year percentage growth in the number of AI patent applications filed repeatedly surpassed that of overall AI between 2014 and 2021. Thus, the medtech sector’s dominance in AI-based patent applications reflects its place at the very forefront of global innovation.

Limitless expansion

A single, previously collected audio file can be mined over and over again. This means that, as the company expand the types of health analyses their AI engine is capable of, it will be possible to use the same original audio file to discover new health markers.

The technology is currently being validated in international clinical trials, in partnership with some of the world's largest private healthcare providers. Decorte Future Industries have further partnered with some of the world's largest tech companies to outline integration into existing consumer products. 

Whilst the technical team are busy working on the technology to recognise sounds, the company itself has been recognised as one to watch for the future, from its origins when Decorte Future Industries was selected as one of 10 companies out of thousands for Techstars’ September 2020 accelerator programme, to more recently when they were awarded Young Business of the Year in September 2023.

So a sound of applause must go to the Decorte Future Industries team and we look forward to hearing more on how future healthcare may be transformed by this technology.