Voice changes can indicate a flare up of COPD symptoms

Image of mobile phone with a recording app open.

Changes in people’s voices recorded on a smart phone can be a sign of a serious flare up in COPD symptoms. That’s according to a pilot study presented at the European Respiratory Congress in Vienna, Austria.

The study was presented by Loes van Bemmel, PhD, a researcher in the department of respiratory medicine at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

“After an exacerbation, patients report a lower quality of life, their lung function can decline and [they] are at an increased and prolonged risk for cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke,” van Bemmel said in a news release. “It’s vital to detect exacerbations as early as possible so appropriate treatment can be given. Unfortunately, it has proved difficult to detect exacerbations at their onset, since symptoms usually start when patients are at home.”Picture of Loes van Bemmel, PhDLoes van Bemmel, PhDEuropean Respiratory Society

That’s where the smart phone comes in. Van Bemmel said patients have told medical professionals that they experience voice changes before and during exacerbations.

“We wanted to see if we could record patients’ speech at home and analyze these recordings for early signs of an exacerbation,” she said.

Twenty-eight patients with COPD took part in the study. They were asked to record their voices via a smartphone app every day for 12 weeks by saying “aah” for as long as they could manage with one breath. They were then asked to read a short paragraph of a story or answer a question. Participants also filled out a daily questionnaire to gauge their COPD symptoms.

Researchers analyzed the recordings to look for changes that coincided with reported flare ups and found that the patients’ voices became higher pitched when an exacerbation was imminent. They also found patients had a jitter in their voices at the start of an exacerbation, making them sound breathy or hoarse.

“These are preliminary results, so our findings need to be validated in larger numbers of patients with COPD,” van Bemmel said. “If we are able to do this, it would pave the way for early detection and diagnosis of exacerbations in the home environment."

She said her team is partnering with researchers at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands to develop a mobile app for people living with COPD. Dubbed SPEAK, it will be used by patients to detect exacerbations via speech signals to help them treat symptoms at home.

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