Alexa Can Now Detect Cardiac Arrests and Alert Authorities

The sedentary lifestyle has led to many diseases being cardiac arrest, the leading cause of natural deaths. In the US, out of 400,000 people who suffer from cardiac arrest each year, less than 6% survive. Nevertheless, the chances for survival are higher if you get aid quickly: rescue breathing can improve your chances.

A speaker in your room can now be used to detect cardiac arrests

The technology has made it easier to take care of your health. The researchers developed a system with Amazon Alexa at the University of Washington that uses machine learning to identify the agonal breathing (the gasping sound) that people make when they’re struggling for air. This is an early alert sign for more than half of all cardiac arrests. This system has a new tool that uses the microphone in your smart speaker or smartphone to detect warning signs and then calls for help on your behalf, could help boost survival rates.

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The investigators built the system using clips of agonal breathing captured from 911 calls made in King County, Washington. They used 729 calls yielding 82 hours’ worth of recordings in total. The false sounds were then rooted out by training the system on other sounds like snoring or noises associated with sleep apnea.

They used two different sets of recordings: sleep sounds collected by 35 volunteers, and those from 12 patients who were participating in a sleep study because they suffered from snoring and apnea. These latter recordings produced some sounds similar to agonal breathing, helping to refine the tool’s accuracy.

“When we tested it on our system, we found a 0.2% false positive rate in the volunteer group and a 0.1% rate in the sleep study,” says Justin Chan, who led the research.

The system managed to rightly recognize agonal breathing in 97% of instances, from up to 20 feet away.

According to npj Digital Medicine, on 19th June 2019, the tool is still at the nascent stage, thus many years away from being available to the public, but the researchers plan to commercialize it eventually. “There’s lots of work we’d have to do before we use this at scale,” Chan said.

He added on that if it were implemented in real life, it would make sense for the system to emit a 15 – or 30-second warning to users that the emergency services are about to be called, so they have the chance to cancel in the event it’s a false alarm. It is planned to be used in bedrooms, as this is where most cardiac arrests happen inside people’s homes.

However, there are still many problems, and issues need to be addressed before the system can be launched, mainly the privacy issues, according to Peter Chai, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“There are questions around what you do with the ambient noise of others in a room, or if you’re gathering information from a phone’s microphone, or what you do with inadvertent recording,” he says.

SOURCE: Alexa Can Now Detect Heart Attacks and Alert Authorities

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