New 'Speech Clock' Technology Estimates Biological Age and Dementia Risk from Vocal Patterns
Researchers have developed a novel 'speech clock' that utilizes machine learning to estimate a person's chronological age and provide insights into brain aging, biological aging, cognitive health, and dementia risk. This technology analyzes hundreds of acoustic and linguistic characteristics of speech, including speech rate, pauses, pitch, emotional content, vocabulary, and semantic precision. The study, published in Science Advances, involved 2,928 Spanish-speaking participants from five Latin American countries, encompassing healthy adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, and various forms of frontotemporal dementia. The 'speech age gap,' which is the difference between a person's actual age and their speech-predicted age, was found to correlate with multiple independent markers of biological aging, brain health, cognition, social adversity, and dementia. People whose speech appeared older than their chronological age showed signs of accelerated aging across several biolo...