Sonde Adds Health Diagnoses on Qualcomm 5G Platforms

Sonde Health technology will be offered as part of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 and 778G 5G mobile platforms, bringing vocal biomarker capability to mobile and IoT, said the company Thursday. The technology uses audio signal processing and machine learning to identify changes in the human voice that may indicate a health condition. With a six-second voice sample, the Sonde product can detect symptoms of asthma and other respiratory illnesses, and it can be used as an early warning system for COVID-19, said the company. Sonde CEO David Liu gave examples of a car detecting whether a driver is impaired, a home hub that can detect the onset of depression or a phone making continuous asthma assessments. Because the capability is native to the device, users opt in to allow voice processing to occur on the phone, eliminating the need to send health data to the cloud and enabling faster results, said the company.