AI Can Detect PTSD & Depression Just By Hearing Sound Of Someone's Voice

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has for years been one of the most challenging disorders to deal with.

It's tough to detect, because there's no test for it besides talking to a therapist, and even that is subjective. But what if we had help?

That's why researchers at New York University have been working on a solution. They say they now have something that can take the guesswork out of PTSD diagnosis. It's an artificial intelligence that can make that diagnosis, simply by listening to the patient talk.

The algorithm doesn't even psychoanalyze the person, it just listens to the sound of their voice.

The AI was built in partnership with SRI international, the firm that originally developed Siri before Apple acquired it. They spent five years developing the voice analysis program. And though it can understand conversation, it's main job is to listen for indicators of PTSD. These could be speech patterns, hesitation, even emotions expressed.

To train the AI, the researchers interviewed and recorded 129 verterans that served in war-zones , gathering 40,000 speech samples from them. They then used those to teach the AI what kind of vocal changes likely signify PTSD. Apparently, the AI can even pinpoint minute signals, like a tension in the throat muscles touching the lips with the tongue.

"They were not the speech features we thought," Charles Marmar, one of the authors on the paper, told the New York Times. "We thought the telling features would reflect agitated speech. In point of fact, when we saw the data, the features are flatter, more atonal speech. We were capturing the numbness that is so typical of PTSD patients."

There are still kinks to work out with the AI though. By training it on the voice samples of only male veterans, it's limited in its ability to detect PTSD in women. However that's rectified easily enough. And when it's ready, this technology could be immensely useful to doctors the world over.

And not just to diagnose military personnel either. PTSD also effects people who have suffered a tragedy, traumatic accident, and very often women that have faced sexual abuse or rape. And with easier detection of the disorder comes the ability to treat so many more people that would have otherwise been left without aid.