The Sound of Your Voice May Reveal That You Have Diabetes

Key Takeaways

• Diabetes symptoms such as dehydration and nerve damage can cause subtle changes in the voice.
• Armed with this insight, researchers were able to create an AI voice analysis that could detect type 2 diabetes with 66 percent accuracy in women and 71 percent accuracy in men.
• The test cannot yet replace standard blood tests and questionnaires for diabetes screening.

Can a person's voice reveal they have type 2 diabetes ? New research suggests it can. A recent study demonstrated that a brief voice recording from a phone, analyzed with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, may be an effective tool for diagnosing this common condition.

Researchers hope that a voice-based test could one day help the more than 240 million people worldwide who are unaware that they have type 2 diabetes.

Findings presented at this year's annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) demonstrated that a newly developed AI model could detect diabetes from an audio sample with 66 percent accuracy in women and 71 percent accuracy in men. (The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.)

"We have shown that people with diabetes have different voice patterns when compared to similar people without diabetes," says a coauthor of the study, Guy Fagherazzi, PhD , the director of the department of precision health at the Luxembourg Institute of Health in Belgium.

"We believe that this technology will never be accurate enough to become a diagnostic tool for type 2 diabetes that could replace a blood test," he says. "On the other hand, we are strongly convinced that this could one day become an efficient solution to screen for diabetes and identify at-risk individuals or potential undiagnosed cases. This could significantly reduce the worldwide diabetes burden, as half of the population with diabetes ignores it."

Scientists Analyzed Thousands of Vocal Traits

For this investigation, 607 adults - half diagnosed with diabetes and half without - were asked to provide a voice recording of themselves reading a few sentences directly from their smartphone or laptop.

Researchers noted that participants with diabetes were generally older than those without the disease, and more likely to have obesity. The average age of women with diabetes in the study was nearly 50, versus 40 for those without diabetes, and men with diabetes were about 48 on average versus 42 for those without.

The study team analyzed 25-second voice samples using two advanced techniques - one that captured up to 6,000 detailed vocal characteristics, and a second, more sophisticated deep-learning approach that focused on a refined set of about 1,000 key features.

Incorporating basic health data including age, sex, body mass index, and hypertension status, the voice-based AI algorithm correctly identified two-thirds of women with diabetes, and 7 out of 10 men.

The AI model performed even better in women age 60 or older and in people with hypertension.

"Women are usually easier to discriminate using voice when there is a health issue. We observed this in previous research on other diseases than diabetes," says Dr. Fagherazzi. "Hypertension is also known to affect voice parameters, so we can speculate that people who have both diabetes and hypertension have an even more distinguishable voice."

The Voice as a Source for Disease Detection

Scientists are increasingly exploring voice characteristics as a means of detecting a range of illnesses, including Parkinson's disease , heart disease , and depression .

The current diabetes study builds on previous research that showed AI could be used to probe speech patterns to detect type 2 diabetes with a high level of accuracy.

"AI and machine learning have the ability to provide new information about the relationship between voices and diabetes," says Kevin Peterson, MD, MPH , the vice president of primary care at the American Diabetes Association.

For now, questionnaires and blood tests remain the standard for detecting and diagnosing diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study noted, however, that detection through this AI technique was in 93 percent agreement with the American Diabetes Association questionnaire-based risk score, demonstrating equivalent performances between voice analysis and a widely accepted screening tool.

Why Diabetes Might Affect the Voice

Fagherazzi and his colleagues suggest that chronic high blood sugar, fatigue, acid reflux, lower pulmonary (lung) capacities, and neuropathies (conditions that affect the nerves) are some of the major drivers that could explain why people with diabetes have different voice traits than people without diabetes.

Susan Spratt, MD , a professor of medicine with a specialty in endocrinology, metabolism, and nutrition at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, suspects that diabetes may affect the voice in several ways.

"First of all, diabetes can cause dehydration , which can affect vocal cord tissue, as well as the tissue lining the mouth and the tongue," says Dr. Spratt, who was not involved in the new study. She speculates that dehydration might make words sound more staccato or "sticky."

She adds, "Long term, diabetes can affect the nerves , including those involved with hearing. Hearing loss is more pronounced in patients with diabetes, which can also impact speech."

"It is not one or another voice characteristic that can explain the difference of voice signatures between people with and without diabetes - it is more a combination of small changes that, when put together, can help to discriminate between the two groups," says Fagherazzi.

"Some people with more than 10 to 20 years of diabetes experience voice changes that can be detectable by the human ear, but overall, it is mostly thanks to the progress of audio signal processing and AI that we can now detect these subtle changes," says Fagherazzi.

Voice Diagnostics Aren't Ready for Wide Use Yet

According to Dr. Peterson, who was not involved in the study, more research is needed before voice tests can be widely used as a tool in doctors' offices.

"This is a hypothesis-generating study," he says. "It points out possibilities to pursue. It is important to determine what effect such technology would have on a ‘real' population before considering implementation. This is a new field of work that is interesting, but it is still too early to know if it will provide clinical value."

Editorial Sources and Fact-Checking

Everyday Health follows strict sourcing guidelines to ensure the accuracy of its content, outlined in our editorial policy . We use only trustworthy sources, including peer-reviewed studies, board-certified medical experts, patients with lived experience, and information from top institutions.

Sources

1. Hossain MJ et al. Diabetes Mellitus, the Fastest Growing Global Public Health Concern: Early Detection Should Be Focused. Health Science Reports . March 2024.
2. Voice Analysis Can Screen People for Type 2 Diabetes With High Accuracy, Study Finds. Diabetologia . September 9, 2024.
3. Suppa A et al. Voice in Parkinson's Disease: A Machine Learning Study. Frontiers in Neurology . February 15, 2022.
4. Mayo Clinic Heart and Voice Study. Mayo Clinic .
5. Huang X et al. Depression Recognition Using Voice-Based Pre-Training Model. Scientific Reports . June 3, 2024.
6. Kaufman J et al. Acoustic Analysis and Prediction of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Using Smartphone-Recorded Voice Segments. Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health . December 2023.
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Don Rauf

Author

Don Rauf has been a freelance health writer for over 12 years and his writing has been featured in HealthDay, CBS News, WebMD, U.S. News & World Report, Mental Floss, United Press International (UPI), Health , and MedicineNet. He was previously a reporter for DailyRx.com where he covered stories related to cardiology, diabetes, lung cancer, prostate cancer, erectile dysfunction, menopause, and allergies. He has interviewed doctors and pharmaceutical representatives in the U.S. and abroad.

He is a prolific writer and has written more than 50 books, including Lost America: Vanished Civilizations , Abandoned Towns , and Roadside Attractions . Rauf lives in Seattle, Washington.

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