Voice Assessment and Vocal Biomarkers in Heart Failure: A Systematic Review.
Level 1 - systematic review of randomized trials
Systematic review
PubMed 40270235 · doi:10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.124.012303
What was done
The authors conducted a systematic review examining the state of the art in voice assessment and vocal biomarkers for chronic heart failure. The review describes the technological foundation of voice feature extraction, evaluates potential clinical roles (diagnosing, risk prediction, and telemonitoring incipient congestion), and highlights methodological and cross-disciplinary challenges in implementing voice analysis.
What was found
The abstract provides no numerical data, pooled performance metrics (such as sensitivity, specificity, or AUC), or details on the number and size of primary studies. It qualitatively describes voice analysis as a promising, convenient, and cost-effective alternative to invasive monitoring or extra hardware.
Why it matters
Vocal biomarkers could provide a scalable, non-invasive method for early telemonitoring of heart failure congestion without requiring dedicated physical hardware. Translating this approach to clinical practice requires structured collaboration between medicine and computer science.
Limits
The abstract does not disclose the search criteria, number of included studies, total participant count, or quantitative accuracy metrics. Furthermore, the true diagnostic utility and susceptibility to acoustic confounders cannot be evaluated from the abstract alone.
Cited by
- supports Cardiovascular disease produces detectable flutter and modulatory fluctuations in specific frequency bands of the voice.