Sonde Health stated on Thursday that it will use its Sonde One vocal biomarker for screening COVID-19 symptoms and its ability to provide an early warning system at schools, workplaces, sporting events in partnership with Xavier University Center for Population Health.

In conjunction, Sonde Health's Sonde One is a research-based smartphone app that quickly and objectively detects signs of respiratory symptoms including chest pain, coughing, or shortness of breath through a six-second voice sample.

The new study will validate the vocal biomarker platform's effectiveness as a daily screening tool be used to augment Xavier's campus-wide contact tracing programme. The study will observe 125 volunteers and will record their voice daily while in quarantine. Those identified by the application as showing respiratory symptoms with one or more COVID-associated symptoms will be immediately tested for COVID-19.

Additionally, clinical trials are underway at various US and international hospitals to validate the vocal biomarkers in COVID-19 patients.

Concurrently, Sonde's health check only takes a few seconds to administer and results are delivered in real-time over most mobile devices and the scaled daily screening of large populations can be achieved to reduce the spread of COVID-19 or influenza.

Leveraging over 1m voice samples from 80,000+ individuals, Sonde Health's proprietary voice-based technology platform detects symptoms of health conditions including depression and respiratory disease – from changes in voice.