Homegrown respiratory healthcare company Salcit Technologies has built a product called Swaasa that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse cough sounds and assess lung health. Now, the company is exploring how Google’s AI model HeAR (Health Acoustic Representations) can help expand the capabilities of their bioacoustic AI models.
To begin, Swaasa is using the AI model to help research and enhance their early detection of TB based on cough sounds.
Google introduced HeAR, a bioacoustic foundation model designed to help researchers build models that can listen to human sounds and flag early signs of disease, earlier this year.
“The Google Research team trained HeAR on 300 million pieces of audio data curated from a diverse and de-identified dataset, and we trained the cough model in particular using roughly 100 million cough sounds,” Google said in a blogpost.
According to the company, the AI model learns to discern patterns within health-related sounds, creating a powerful foundation for medical audio analysis.
“We found that, on average, HeAR ranks higher than other models on a wide range of tasks and for generalising across microphones, demonstrating its superior ability to capture meaningful patterns in health-related acoustic data,” the tech giant said.
TB is treatable, but millions of cases go undiagnosed each year because people do not have convenient access to healthcare. In order to eradicate TB, improving diagnosis is crucial, and AI can play a critical role in improving detection and making care more accessible and affordable, Google noted.
Using machine learning, Swaasa offers location-independent, equipment-free respiratory health assessments to bridge the gap between accessibility, affordability and scalability. Using HeAR, they hope to extend screening for TB across India more widely, it added.
“Every missed case of tuberculosis is a tragedy; every late diagnosis, a heartbreak. Acoustic biomarkers offer the potential to rewrite this narrative. I am deeply grateful for the role HeAR can play in this transformative journey,” said Sujay Kakarmath, a product manager at Google Research working on HeAR.
Further, the tech giant said that it hopes to advance the development of future diagnostic tools and monitoring solutions in TB, chest, lung and other disease areas, and help improve health outcomes for communities around the globe through their research.