Smart speaker could prevent death from cardiac arrest

February 24, 2020

Some people say that a smart speaker like Google health home and Amazon Echo simply makes us lazy while unnecessarily adding electronic complexity to our lives.

However, a smart speaker could prevent some people from dying from cardiac arrest while sleeping. When a person has a cardiac arrest, that is, when their heart stops beating, they stop breathing or start to run out of air. The latter case is known as agonal breathing.

Smart speaker could prevent death from cardiac arrest

In some cases, their lives can be saved if someone performs cardiopulmonary resuscitation within minutes. If they are alone or with someone else who is deeply asleep in their room, it is unlikely that someone else will hear what is going on; and can therefore intervene.

Concerned about the situation, scientists at the University of Washington began by collecting 236 2.5-second audio clips; representing the agonal breathing of patients in cardiac arrest. These were retrieved from 162 calls to the 911 number made to the Seattle emergency medical services between 2009 and 2017. The people who made these calls put their phones in the patient's mouth so that the dispatchers could hear how they breathing.

Using machine learning techniques, the researchers created additional audio clips; bringing the dataset to a total of 7,316. ​​They also created a dataset of 7,305 clips consisting of sounds made regularly by people while they sleep; like snoring for example.

All of these sounds were then analyzed by machine learning algorithms. The result was a program capable of correctly identifying agonal breathing in 97% of the cases, when you "listened" through a smart speaker such as an Amazon Echo placed at a maximum distance of six meters.

It is now hoped that the tool, once developed, could take the form of an application that would work on smart devices (possibly including smartphones) in the bedroom of those at risk throughout the night.

“We envision a contactless system that works by continuously and passively monitoring the bedroom for a single breathing event and warning anyone nearby to practice agonal breathing.