Cédric Tamavond, VoiceMed co-founders;
Credit: © VoiceMed
In an interview with Silicon Luxembourg, the team of VoiceMed, an app that screens COVID-19 symptoms, announced plans to launch in Luxembourg in the near future.
The app that can screen COVID-19 symptoms via a phone call and report on the risks of infection in real time. Once connected, callers are requested to cough three times, breathe deeply several times and say a specific sentence in English. Test results are shared with the callers immediately.
“The application can tell how high, medium or low the infection risk is”, explained Cédric Tamavond, one of the three VoiceMed’s co-founders. “Results are sent to callers via SMS. And when affected they can decide to contact their doctor and apply for a Covid-test".
Based on voice recognition technologies, the solution can identify symptoms as well as biomarkers and help uncover pathological or physiological diseases.
Mr Tamavond added: “As the app can support millions of calls simultaneously, we could pre-screen Luxembourg within a few hours instead of the current six months”.
To identify the disease, the application uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and relies on a voice database. For that, VoiceMed has developed a web-application that collects voice recordings. Around 1,500 voices of coronavirus patients have been already collected, through partnerships with hospitals and research centres in Lithuania, Spain, Brazil and Nigeria.
A voice model has been created, based on the collected samples, and will serve as a vocal reference to determine the risk. The model, however, still needs thousands of voice samples to gain precision.
Each VoiceMed test will cost around €2. “Compared to individual PCR-tests that costs between €50 and €100, the country could save millions of euros”, commented Mr Tamavond.
In the future, the app is due to include a dashboard and functionalities that will help governments to estimate in real time the number of tested and infected persons, and then take strategic decisions and actions.
VoiceMed will soon register as a startup with its headquarters in Luxembourg, although the hosting incubator remains unknown. In order to launch a precise product within three months, the future company needs a funding of €50,000, as well as fifteen additional engineers and partnerships with Luxembourg-based hospitals and research centres.
Launched half a year ago during the online Hack for crisis Italy, the VoiceMed initiative currently includes around 20 people, based in ten countries.
