About to die? Voice test over phone can tell
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 22 October 2009, 22:27 IST   |    9 Comments
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About to die? Voice test over phone can tell
Washington: Japanese researchers have come up with a computer program, which can tell if a person is about to die by listening to his voice when he makes an emergency call. The study is published in the open access journal BMC Emergency Medicine presents a computer algorithm. This unique algorithm can predict the patient's chances of dying at the time of the emergency call, according to Time of India. Kenji Ohshige and a team of researchers from the Yokohama City University School of Medicine in Japan collected information of more than 60,000 emergency calls from October 2008 to March 2009, to assess it at the new Yokohama computer-based triage emergency system. Ohshige, the Lead Researcher, said "A patient's life threat risk can be quantitatively expressed at the moment of the emergency call with a moderate level of accuracy. The algorithm for estimating a patient's like threat risk should be improved further as more data are collected." The severity of the patient's condition was categorized accordingly after triage information for each call was entered into the computer system. The researchers then compared the computer-estimated threat of dying at the time of the emergency call with the actual patients' condition upon arrival at the hospital emergency department to find that the algorithm was effective in assessing the life risk of a patient with over 80 percent sensitivity. This system is designed to help meet the ever increasing demand for ambulance. With the help of this software, emergency of the situation is predicted through the voice and then ambulance is dispatched.

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