Voice assistants can be trained to detect heart attacks

An at-home device that uses Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri may one day be able to detect whether someone is having a heart attack. Using 911 audio recordings where the caller was having a heart attack, researchersused the voice assistants to pick up sounds of irregular breathing such as gasping. They then trained a program to identify whether a person was having a heart attack using patterns from audio recordings. The researchers also tested the program in home sleep environments and found that it was accurately able to identify heart attacks the majority of the time. Only half of heart attack patients have irregular breathing as one of their symptoms, which means that other systems will be needed to help those who experience heart attacks at home.