Gizmag is reporting that a team of Dutch researchers from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands Defence Academy and TNO Defence, Security and Safety, have developed voice monitoring technology that may help with triaging emergency calls to overloaded first responders.  The scientists believe that the level of stress detected in a voice is an indicator of the acuteness of the actual emergency and may be even help decide whether to send out an ambulance.  There is still no word on the system’s ability to parse out hypochondriacs and hysterical mothers from the rest of the callers.

“Stress and negative emotions, in general, have a strong influence on voice characteristics,” the researchers explain. “Because speech is a natural means of communication, we can utilise the sound patterns of speech to detect stress and (negative) emotions in a non-intrusive way by monitoring the communication.” Factors such as how quickly a person is talking, whether or not there are rises and falls in pitch and tone and breathing rate, all change when we are stressed and can be detected.The team has now “trained” a computer algorithm that receives audio input from emergency calls to assess the emotive level of the callers’ speech.  Four different training techniques were used with recordings from actual emergencies of known outcome and the team says their error rates are as low as 4.2% for a database of call centre recordings used in the research.  Optimization of the algorithm using a larger training set and more robust statistical tools might improve that still further.

The researchers expect the system to have military applications in the first instance. However, it could be adapted to the civilian emergency services and perhaps other applications, such as criminal investigations.