Cigna Launches StressWaves Voice-Activated Stress Test
Cigna International has launched the Cigna StressWaves Test, a free online tool that analyses acoustic and semantic voice patterns to evaluate stress levels.
The StressWaves Test was created with Ellipsis Health, a medical technology developer and provider of health and vocal biomarkers. The StressWaves Test will reveal the user's stress level, ranging from 'Extremely Stressed' to 'No Stress', along with a portrait that visualizes the effect of stress on the user's body and mind.
The decision-support tool builds on more than 20 years of research and is based on training a dataset of more than 15,000 adults to ensure the algorithms are robust enough to cater for different populations with varying accents and levels of English-speaking ability.
The free online test is also interoperable with various systems and on any electronic device, as long as there is a microphone and internet connection. StressWaves Test analyzes stress through acoustic (sounds, such as tone, pitch, pause, etc.) and semantic (word choices and syntax) patterns. Users can answer open-ended, low-stigma questions for 90 seconds and are then provided with a visualization of their stress. The test will not retain the voice recordings once they have been used to produce the stress measurements.
"Stress and mental health issues have been pushed up the agenda in recent years. While this increased awareness is a positive change, the pandemic has created many new pressures in our lives. If stress goes unchecked, we may see dramatic consequences, and that's why innovative health tools like the Cigna StressWaves Test are so important. By providing simple solutions at scale that are easy to use and accessible when the people need them most, we can encourage people to learn more about stress and seek professional help as appropriate," said Dr. Peter Mills, associate medical director of Cigna in Europe, in a statement.
"The best medicine is prevention. We are proud to partner with Cigna to offer the StressWaves Test to the general public for free, so that we can help individuals around the world address their stress as early as possible to prevent it from progressing into more serious mental health issues," said Dr. Michael Aratow>, co-founder and chief medical officer at Ellipsis Health, in a statement.