Feasibility of Incorporating Voice Technology and Virtual Assistants in Cardiovascular Care and Clinical Trials

Abstract

Purpose of Review With the rising cost of cardiovascular clinical trials, there is interest in determining whether new technologies can increase cost effectiveness. This review focuses on current and potential uses of voice-based technologies, including virtual assistants, in cardiovascular clinical trials. Recent Findings Numerous potential uses for voice-based technologies have begun to emerge within cardiovascular medicine. Voice biomarkers, subtle changes in speech parameters, have emerged as a potential tool to diagnose and monitor many cardiovascular conditions, including heart failure, coronary artery disease, and pulmonary hypertension. With the increasing use of virtual assistants, numerous pilot studies have examined whether these devices can supplement initiatives to promote transitional care, physical activity, smoking cessation, and medication adherence with promising initial results. Additionally, these devices have demonstrated the ability to streamline data collection by administering questionnaires accurately and reliably. With the use of these technologies, there are several challenges that must be addressed before wider implementation including respecting patient privacy, maintaining regulatory standards, acceptance by patients and healthcare providers, determining the validity of voice-based biomarkers and endpoints, and increased accessibility. Summary Voice technology represents a novel and promising tool for cardiovascular clinical trials; however, research is still required to understand how it can be best harnessed.

Privacy in smart speakers: A systematic literature review

“…The appearance of the search keywords in the abstract of those papers was marginal and even by chance. An example of a paper exhibiting those keywords but outside the scope of our investigation was Gouda et al, 22 which focuses on the use of voice‐based technologies (including virtual assistants) in cardiovascular clinical trials.…”

Voice-Based Screening for SARS-CoV-2 Exposure in Cardiovascular Clinics (VOICE-COVID-19-II): Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

“…However, such research has been primarily observational, resulting in a high potential for risk of bias from the priming effect, which can occur when an exposure to certain screening strategy influences responses to a subsequent one. In addition, it is unclear how such technologies perform when interacting with patients who are older and have multiple comorbidities such as those with heart failure (HF) [ 11 ]. Additional knowledge gaps include questions related to ethical and privacy concerns of patients exposed to digital tools [ 12 ].…”

Speech biomarkers of risk factors for vascular dementia in people with mild cognitive impairment

“…Most studies using speech as a biomarker focus on detecting neurological disorders and mental health-related pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease ( Martínez-Nicolás et al, 2021 ), depression ( Espinola et al, 2021 ) or schizophrenia ( Martínez-Sánchez et al, 2015 ). However, there is a body of work that addresses other aspects of health, such as sleep apnea ( Solé-Casals et al, 2014 ) or the detection and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases ( Gouda et al, 2021 ). It is on the latter, and other risk factors for vascular dementia, that we will focus in this research.…”