Cambridge Cognition Holdings plc (LON:COG), the neuroscience technology company which develops and markets digital solutions to assess brain health, has today announced its voice biomarker and AI platform, NeuroVocalix™, for use in clinical trials.
Having filed patents and announced the start of the technology programme last year, the Company has now confirmed its first voice-based cognitive assessments are available for use in its core pharmaceutical and biotechnology clinical trial channels.
NeuroVocalix enables novel voice-based cognitive assessments to be delivered directly to patients through mobile and tele-health platforms, helping to improve outcomes in clinical trials, aid clinical decision-making and play an important role in the management of long-term conditions such as chronic pain.
Data presented today at Intelligent Health in Basel demonstrates the new technology’s ability to use AI to derive voice biomarkers, which can objectively measure mental states.
One major use of this technology is likely to be in the objective voice-based measurement of pain. Chronic pain is a major unmet medical need, affecting around 1 in 3 people worldwide and costing €441 billion per year in Europe1 and $560-635 billion per year in the USA2. Insufficient pain relief increases personal suffering and is a major cause for premature exit from the labour market, and increases risk of other health problems, social exclusion and poverty.
While many treatments for pain are available, they do not work for everyone and often have undesirable side effects. The lack of objective measurement of pain poses a major barrier to developing better treatments of pain control.
NeuroVocalix is designed to elicit and automatically analyse pain-related signals in human voice. This will provide an innovative, objective means of measuring pain for use in clinical trials as a more accurate assessment of a drug’s effects and eventually in clinical practice where it will support appropriate prescribing and performance-based reimbursement.
This broadly applicable machine-learning platform is already generating interest from digital health companies specialising in areas ranging from pain to Parkinson’s disease and psychiatry with the first commercial partnerships expected in 2018.
Dr Steven Powell, Chief Executive Officer, Cambridge Cognition Holdings plc said: “This new platform is a key step in the Company’s strategy for growth; developing innovative near-patient digital technologies to optimise drug development and patient health outcomes. Voice biomarker data provides our commercial partners with additional insights into drug treatment outcomes and compliments our mobile, wearable and web-based digital health technologies in assessing cognition and brain health anytime, anywhere.”
References
1 The Societal Impact of Pain Platform, 2017, Impact of Pain on Society Costs the EU up to 441 Billion Euros Annually. Available from: https://www.sip-platform.eu/press-area/article/impact-of-pain-on-society-costs-the-eu-up-to-441-billion-euros-annually
2 Gaskin DJ, Richard P. The Economic Costs of Pain in the United States. In: Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Advancing Pain Research, Care, and Education. Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2011. Appendix C. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92521/
