> Case study

Moving critical research forward through remote voice and speech monitoring

Background

Evaluating rates of change in neurologic and psychiatric disorders can be tricky, especially without spending considerable time with a patient.

Human behavior varies so much that these evaluations rely heavily on evolution from an individual’s baseline instead of a measurement threshold that works for everybody, the way vital signs such as heart rate and body temperature do.

Working with HumanFIrst

Some pharmaceutical companies studying treatments for psychiatric and neurologic disorders have seen success in this area by evaluating biomarkers related to voice and speech. More importantly, they’ve found ways to measure such biomarkers remotely, gathering more data, more often, for more effective research.

It was with this goal in mind that a digital health lead at one of the world’s largest pharma companies reached out to HumanFirst regarding well validated tools for processing data associated with speech cadence, vocal pitch, and similar measures.

“Sifting through PubMed can be difficult. Atlas finds the most relevant papers, giving me the information I need to confidently make a good decision.”

- Digital Health Director, Top 10 Pharmaceutical Company

Results

The team first searched HumanFirst’s Atlas catalog to findrelevant voice and speech measurement tools that could be usedfor remote patient monitoring. They then worked directly withHumanFirst to filter down to options that met their strict criteriafor quality of evidence.

Using the Atlas Compare feature, they viewed leading optionsside-by-side, eventually narrowing down to two companies thatoffered the solutions they needed to move their importantresearch forward in areas such as anxiety, schizophrenia, andbipolar disorder.

Voice or speech measurement within neurology and psychology is one of 500+ measure categories on the Atlas data platform. Atlas covers 10,000+ measures and more than 2000 digital health technologies.