2024 Speech Industry Award Winner: Sonde Health Soars for the Air Force

Boston-based Sonde Health has positioned itself as a leader in voice-based health monitoring, and the U.S. military has taken notice. In late August, the Air Force awarded it a $1.2 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract to advance the company’s Mental Fitness technology specifically for military use. Sonde will integrate and evaluate the tool within Air Force mental health and resilience programs to validate its effectiveness and scalability across the Department of Defense.

This latest contract follows an earlier award, granted in January, in which Sonde received a $71,166 Phase I grant to develop and deploy Sonde Mental Fitness for the Air Force.

Jim Harper, Sonde’s founder and chief strategy officer, says, “the customization and integration work planned for this Phase II effort will enable use and validation of this next-generation mental fitness tracking technology in selected [Air Force] settings. This will add a new and important mental dimension to remote physical fitness tracking capabilities that are being integrated and deployed to enhance training programs and operational command data interfaces.”

Sonde Health, which was founded in 2015, leverages a voice dataset with more than 1.2 million samples from more than 85,000 people on four continents. It uses advanced audio signal processing, speech science, and artificial intelligence to sense and analyze subtle vocal changes that could indicate the presence of several conditions. Its technology can detect and monitor respiratory health conditions, like asthma, from 6 seconds of voice, and mental conditions like depression and anxiety from 30 seconds of voice.

And now, the company’s voice biomarker technology can also detect cognitive issues, thanks to a product launched earlier this summer.

This new solution, called Sonde Cognitive Fitness, analyzes vocal characteristics from 30-second voice interactions and generates a cognitive effort score.

“This convenient and noninvasive cognitive fitness tracking solution is the natural progression for Sonde, as we are now the only company to analyze and monitor vocal biomarkers for three of the body’s crucial functions—cognitive, mental, and respiratory,” said David Liu, CEO of Sonde, in a statement.

To develop this tool, Sonde partnered with GN Group and leading academic medical centers, including Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the Montefiore Medical Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Today, Sonde provides its vocal biomarker technology to several prominent telehealth, pharmaceutical, remote patient monitoring, and consumer/medical device companies, because it’s been shown again and again to work.

In late August, Sonde Health showcased the interim findings of a joint research study on the effectiveness of using vocal biomarkers to detect cognitive impairment in older adults. It found that vocal biomarkers are a reliable solution to detect symptoms of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults in a nonclinical setting. These findings join a growing body of research that demonstrates the efficacy of vocal biomarkers to identify meaningful changes in health for individuals with conditions like depression, stress- and trauma-related conditions, and anxiety.

“The ability to collect mental health data from patients between clinic visits could transform how we monitor symptoms and optimize treatment plans,” said Lindsey Venesky, a licensed psychologist and clinical director at the Cognitive Behavior Institute (CBI), which collaborated with Sonde Health on one study. “Voice-based health tracking technology can provide accurate insights into a client’s mental health status over time and can do so seamlessly and unobtrusively, with little added effort for clients.”

“Sonde is at the forefront of a vocal biomarker revolution that has the potential to change how we detect, manage, and understand our health. They have the deepest high-quality dataset combined with leading-edge processing technology, which gives them a significant competitive advantage,” said Partners Investment vice president Joonsoo Kim, whose company took part in a recent Sonde Health funding round. “We believe Sonde’s team and platform are primed to disrupt and add tremendous value to health monitoring around the world, and we’re thrilled to support the company’s mission to harness the power of voice for better health.”