Cambridge Cognition Holdings PLC (LON:COG), the neuroscience digital health company, has today announced its application of automatic speech recognition (“ASR”) technology to develop new products to enable scalable, language-based clinical assessment to reduce clinical trial variability and costs and increase overall clinical trial efficiency.
The Company is now employing commercially available Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and ASR technologies to make language-based verbal cognitive assessments that are scalable, automated and consistent, which in turn will reduce human error between trial centres and between trial subjects. The first products are expected to be available commercially in mid 2018.
Language is a unique human capability that exhibits measurable changes in many psychiatric and neurological conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, depression and schizophrenia. To date it has been difficult for clinical researchers to perform language-based assessments or measure verbal cognitive changes without highly trained experts. Now this new combination of speech recognition technology with Cambridge Cognition’s validated computerised tests will make this possible.
This new platform, powered by AI, will allow innovative types of language-based cognitive assessment raising the possibility of delivering clinician-administered cognitive testing remotely and directly into people’s homes for health assessments and trial subject profiling and triaging. The company also sees future opportunities to provide a means of monitoring well-established clinical interactions objectively for quality control, which will reduce reliance on human raters. This could have a significant impact on trial cost and speed of recruitment.
The Company’s ASR-based technology will be unveiled formally at the Alzheimer’s Association Technology and Dementia preconference in London on July 15 2017, where data from a proof of concept study will be presented.
Jenny Barnett, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, Cambridge Cognition Holdings Plc said: “We see significant opportunities to improve upon rater-administered tests such as the MMSE and ADAS-cog. Rater costs are a high proportion of clinical trial budgets. Reducing these costs and inherent variability will help effective drugs get to market faster and deliver better value for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, clinicians and patients.”
Steven Powell, PhD, Chief Executive Officer, Cambridge Cognition said: “Alongside our existing, non-verbal cloud based and wearable cognitive assessment products, this new speech-based platform will provide solutions for delivering economic, clinically beneficial clinical trials. This is another significant step in applying innovative new technology to optimise drug development productivity and patient engagement for our customers and partners and it will be the third key technology advancement developed and launched by our innovation team since its formation in 2015.”
