Winterlight™ has is increasingly used in clinical studies but was, until now, only available to academic researchers through bespoke collaboration agreements. Wider academic use creates opportunities for independent research which expands the evidence base for speech-based biomarkers adding to the more than 3,700 CANTAB® publications. Independent studies establish validity across different populations and settings, which then drives wider use in drug development and healthcare.
Speech provides valuable insights into cognitive function and neuropsychiatric symptoms. A short speech sample can elicit hundreds of measures across acoustic and linguistic features - such as speech rate, pauses, vocabulary and sentence structure - extracting rich data with limited participant burden. Recent academic research has shown that speech also has utility outside neurology and psychiatry in fields as diverse as detecting liver disease.
This launch makes Winterlight™ more readily accessible to the academic market and marks a milestone in Cambridge Cognition’s continued investment in speech with the start of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) project earlier this year. This will strengthen the Company’s leadership in this field and equip researchers, physicians and drug developers with complementary touchscreen and speech-based tools and richer insights.
Rob Baker, CEO of Cambridge Cognition, said: “Academic researchers play an important role in evaluating new measures and building the independent evidence that supports wider adoption. This launch strengthens both the commercial opportunity for our speech offering and develops its longer-term value in wider applications such as pharmaceutical research and healthcare.”
Dr Sunny X Tang, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health, commented: “Speech gives us a practical way to create objective markers for neuropsychiatric conditions which are missing from usual clinical care and clinical trials. In our past work with Cambridge Cognition, we used their speech analysis tool in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and found that features, such as speech rate and pauses, track negative symptom severity reliably across visits. In a separate study of 266 participants, a brief speech sample, particularly a simple picture description task, was enough to distinguish people with psychiatric disorders from healthy volunteers with good accuracy.
“These results suggest speech is a promising tool for supporting clinical assessment and screening, even in varied clinical populations where people often have more than one condition. The addition of more independent evidence will further advance this field, validate these tools, and help us better understand where speech measures work best, and how they can be used in research and clinical care.”
