On July 1, 2024, we launched a new ExplainMe research project, “Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Acoustic Features extracted from Speech”, which focuses on algorithms for analyzing and explaining complex medical data and data in the form of multidimensional series. Thanks to funds of almost PLN 4 million, a 7-person research team will be established at the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, led by Dr. Hab. Katarzyna Kaczmarek-Majer, prof. IBS PAN, who will work on information technologies including explainable computational intelligence methods that summarize complex data, including medical data. The developed easy-to-interpret information grains, e.g. linguistic summaries, can support doctors in preventive diagnostics and monitoring of affective disorders. As part of the project, two pilot implementations of the developed technology in the field of medicine are planned.
“The patient’s voice indicates the beginning of a depressive episode because the pace of speech has slowed down in the last week and the tone of speech has changed significantly.”
The above sentence is an example of a linguistic summary. Summaries are expressions in natural language that describe large sets of data and complex processes of their analysis in a human-friendly way. Clinical practice and the latest research confirm that the way of speaking can be a signal of mental disorders or recurrences of affective states. Although voice monitoring applications have developed in recent years, there is no reliable system supporting health monitoring based on the way of speaking. In practice, easy-to-use and trustworthy tools are still needed that, thanks to the use of modern technologies and artificial intelligence, will help explain why the patient’s condition is changing.
The project is carried out in cooperation with Britenet Med sp. z o.o., scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw and with scientific partners from the following centers:
- Dr. José María Alonso Moral from Research Centre on Intelligent Technologies (CiTIUS), University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain
- Prof. Roberto V. Zicari from Trustworthy AI Lab, ARCADA University of Applied Science, Helsinki
- Prof. Jochen Leidner from Coburg University of Applied Science and Arts, Germany
- Dr. Martina Daňková from IT4Innovations Center of Excellence, a branch of the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
- Dr. Jose Sousa from Sano-Centre for Computational Personalised Medicine
- Dr. Hab. Gabriella Casalino from the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Bari, Italy
The ExplainMe project is funded by the Foundation for Polish Science (Contract No. FENG.02.02-IP.05-0302/23) within the framework of the First Team FENG action, financed by the European Funds for Modern Economy program.
We are happy to start work on this important issue and invite you to follow our progress!
