Speech Biomarkers

Tracking Speech as a Neural Wellness Biomarker

We want to create a web app for monitoring cognitive health, allowing people to check for themselves the effects of lifestyle choices, medical interventions, or just the passage of time. But for effective testing, we need to know how lots of people respond to lots of tests.

The goal is not to score your performance against other people, but rather to make it possible for you to track your own performance across time, just as if you were tracking your weight or exercise goals.

Some of the best measures of cognitive health come from speech -- how someone describes a picture, what happens when they try to think of words of a certain kind, and so on. So we're starting with a couple of traditional speech tasks.

Once we have results from a few thousand people on a few dozen tasks, we should be able to create an app for valid tracking of neural wellness. Each task just takes a minute or two -- and we hope that you'll return several times, to try different versions of the tasks.

This project is not aimed at participants with cognitive impairment, or even at older people -- we need all ages and backgrounds and conditions. So please enroll at https://speechbiomarkers.org -- and tell others about it as well!

The collection is designed and managed by the Linguistic Data Consortium and the Frontotemporal Degeneration Center at the University of Pennsylvania. We will publish an anonymized version of the resulting data for use by research groups worldwide.

Thanks for contributing!