Is Speech the New Blood? Recent Progress in AI-Based Disease Detection From Audio in a Nutshell

In recent years, advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have impacted several areas of research and application. Besides more prominent examples like self-driving cars or media consumption algorithms, AI-based systems have further started to gain more and more popularity in the health care sector, however whilst being restrained by high requirements for accuracy, robustness, and explainability. Health-oriented AI research as a sub-field of digital health investigates a plethora of human-centered modalities. In this article, we address recent advances in the so far understudied but highly promising audio domain with a particular focus on speech data and present corresponding state-of-the-art technologies. Moreover, we give an excerpt of recent studies on the automatic audio-based detection of diseases ranging from acute and chronic respiratory diseases via psychiatric disorders to developmental disorders and neurodegenerative disorders. Our selection of presented literature shows that the recent success of deep learning methods in other fields of AI also more and more translates to the field of digital health, albeit expert-designed feature extractors and classical ML methodologies are still prominently used. Limiting factors, especially for speech-based disease detection systems, are related to the amount and diversity of available data, e. g., the number of patients and healthy controls as well as the underlying distribution of age, languages, and cultures. Finally, we contextualize and outline application scenarios of speech-based disease detection systems as supportive tools for health-care professionals under ethical consideration of privacy protection and faulty prediction.