Cigna Europe has launched a new voice-activated stress test, designed to evaluate stress levels within 90 sectors.
This StressWaves Test has been created with Ellipsis Health, a medical technology developer and leader in AI health and vocal biomarkers.
The technology evaluates pitch, tone, word choice and pauses in a user’s speech to give a measured reading of their current stress level. It is currently the only tool on the market that analyses stress through acoustic and semantic patterns, and Cigna says its development follows more than two decades of research.
The advanced AI is free to use, and is based on training a dataset of over 15,000 adults aged from 18-80+, ensuring the algorithms were robust enough to cater for different populations with varying accents and levels of English-speaking ability.
In addition to design considerations for age, sex, and education-level, the free online test is also operaable with various systems and on any electronic device, as long as there is a microphone and internet connection.
Users are invited to answer open-ended, low-stigma questions for 90 seconds enabling an algorithm, coupled with industry-leading health science, to then provide a visualisation using colour and movement of the individual’s stress – from ‘extremely stressed’ to ‘no stress’.
In England mental health problems cost £119bn last year according to Cigna Europens’ recent 360 Wellbeing survey, which reveals the growing importance of mental health as part of overall health and wellbeing.
Additionally, the research shows that 71 per cent of people in the UK report being stressed (versus 83 per cent of people globally), with 12 per cent experiencing unmanageable stress (versus 13 per cent globally).
Dr Peter Mills, associate medical director, Cigna Europe, said: “Stress and mental health issues have been pushed up the agenda in recent years. While this increased awareness is a positive change, the pandemic has created many new pressures in our lives.
“If stress goes unchecked, we may see dramatic consequences and that’s why innovative health tools like the Cigna StressWaves Test are so important. By providing simple solutions at scale that are easy to use and accessible when the people need them most, we can encourage people to learn more about stress and seek professional help as appropriate.”
The test will not retain the voice recordings once they have been used to produce the stress measurements, and is fully HIPAA and GDPR compliant. The tests can be used at www.cignastresswaves.com and www.stresswaves.cignaglobal.com for employers.