There are now over 7 billion people on planet earth and every time they speak, it says something about their health. At Aural Analytics, we have a mission to tap into this signal-rich data stream and make clinically-relevant insights available to the scientific community.
With that in mind, today we are proud to announce the release of A2E (Aural Analytics Embed), a Software Development Kit for Clinical-Grade Speech Analytics that enables clinical researchers and their partners to easily embed speech endpoints ubiquitously in any application (iOS, Android and web), in any language, with only a few lines of code. This release represents an important leap forward in the quest to identify and track devastating neurological and respiratory diseases, such as Parkinson’s, ALS, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and COPD.
Why Speech?
Speech is among the most complex of all human behaviors – our “gift of gab” is the consequence of vast neuronal networks in the brain translating thoughts into language, and over one-hundred muscles translating language into vocalizations for others to hear. Any disturbance that affects any component of this complex behavior is manifested in the speech signal. In this way, speech can be a window into health, offering a rich source of important scientific and clinical data.
The challenge of successfully collecting and mining this data for insights into neurological and respiratory health in a clinical tool is daunting. Such a tool must consistently, accurately, reliably and safely collect and analyze speech data; as well as be deployable in-clinic or at home, across different languages, and under different regulatory or clinical constraints. Effectively eliciting and analyzing speech for specific health applications requires a rare depth of knowledge and experience in speech neuroscience, linguistics, and speech analysis. Our scientists and engineers have worked hard to integrate this insight into the A2E system to extend our partners’ digital health platforms in a clinically-meaningful way.
Reaching Ubiquity
At Aural Analytics, we believe wide dissemination of speech collection and analytics in the fields of neurology and respiratory disease is critical. We understood very early on that our own applications, such as the SCRIP award winning Speech Vitals mobile application for clinical trials, would be useful, but that an easily embeddable system that could be leveraged by researchers and their support organizations directly would represent a far larger impact on patient outcomes.
After several years of customer discovery and real-world study execution, we developed A2E with several clear objectives.
- Ease of integration:
We built A2E in a way that removes burden from the sponsors and partner organizations we work with by making integration extremely low lift for product and technical teams.
- Focused Use Cases:
We focused A2E to support standard, hybrid and decentralized pharmaceutical clinical trials, remote monitoring and telemedicine.
- Scale:
We architected the speech tasks and analytics in a modular and dynamic format, easily embeddable into different platforms (iOS, Android, web), readily available in different languages (currently 14 languages available, with several more in development), compliant with HIPAA and GDPR, and effective in-clinic or via a patient’s personal device at-home.
- Reliability, Interpretability and Ease of Use:
We ensured that A2E returns analytics from our scientifically driven, validated metric suite that clinicians can interpret in the context of their disease or area of interest and that could be useful in regulatory submissions where needed.
- User Experience Innovation:
We designed our user interface to minimize patient burden while maximizing clinical utility (something we perfected over decades working directly with patients who are experiencing various motor and/or cognitive decline).
- Partner Friendly:
We needed a partner portal that would allow for data and metric download, quality assurance and compliance updates, and system administration.
Ensuring Quality
In the development of our technologies, including A2E, we have made a direct and concerted effort to lead the speech neuroscience industry in quality and safety. We have openly supported institutions like DIME Society, DTRA, and others as they work across the industry to raise awareness and build frameworks around topics such as patient safety, security, and data integrity. The result of this ongoing effort is a system that will withstand questions on clinical, construct and analytic validity and meets those sets of regulatory requirements that may apply including 21 CFR Part 11 for electronic records and signatures, 21 CFR 820.70 for automated processes, 45 CFR 164 for security and privacy, HIPAA, GDPR, GCP and GxP.
The release of A2E represents an important advancement for clinical research and better patient outcomes across the continuum of care and lifespan.
By opening up A2E for integration into third party systems, clinical researchers, pharmaceutical companies, clinical research organizations, telemedicine providers, and academics are now able to elicit speech in a scientifically grounded way, and can receive analytics rich in information about patient health without having the heavy burden of architecting and building the systems themselves.
Speech holds innumerable clues to the body’s health, and we are proud to help researchers and clinicians unlock its potential to detect abnormalities as they fight for a cure for debilitating neurodegenerative and respiratory disorders.
For more information about A2E, please contact Jeffrey.Searles@auralanalytics.com.
