Sonde Health, a PureTech Health spinout company that creates vocal biomarker technology, today announced it’s collaborating with wireless technology company Qualcomm Technologies.

The partnership will integrate Sonde’s machine learning vocal biomarker capabilities with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 and 778G 5G mobile platforms to bring health screening and monitoring applications to mobile devices that use these platforms.

Sonde’s lead product, Sonde One, can detect asthma, COPD, COVID-19, depression and anxiety with only a six-second voice sample. Through this collaboration, device makers can enable vocal biomarker monitoring as a device feature that users can opt-in for.

The hope is that users can receive faster and more secure results because their mobile devices already have the capability to monitor their vocal biomarkers built-in.

“Imagine a car that can detect whether a driver is too impaired to drive safely, or a home hub that can detect the onset of depression, or a phone that can make continuous asthma assessments,” David Liu, CEO at Sonde Health, said in a statement.

“Bringing the vocal biomarker technology directly into mobile hardware will make new health features more useful and secure. This collaboration marks a tremendous boost to our growth strategy, a vote of confidence in our technology, and a giant leap forward for preventive and personalized health care.”

Royal Philips and Cognizant, an IT consulting firm, are teaming up to develop digital health products and services with a mission to improve patient care and accelerate clinical trials.

The strategic partnership is built around Philips’ HealthSuite, a cloud-based platform for constructing and hosting clinical and consumer health applications. The HealthSuite supports remote patient monitoring, patient and physician collaboration and data analytics. 

Through it, Cognizant will build, deploy, implement and operate digital health applications on behalf of its clients.

"Cognizant and Philips are each dedicated to improving people's lives through health technology," Ursula Morgenstern, president of Global Growth Markets at Cognizant, said in a statement.

"This new collaboration will provide critical solutions that help manage the growing amount of health data available, keep patients and providers better connected, and help accelerate life-saving therapies to market.”

Psychedelic-inspired biotech company MindMed has tapped Datavant to help link its clinical trial data with external evidence from other clinical trials and real-world data sources.

MindMed is on a mission to better treat behavioral health conditions like anxiety, ADHD and opioid addiction through psychedelic-inspired interventions. It’s in the process of researching and developing a number of medicines and treatments based on psychedelic substances including psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, DMT and an ibogaine derivative, 18-MC.

Using Datavant’s privacy-protecting technology, MindMed will create datasets to understand the real-world treatment, service utilization and healthcare experiences of patients with psychiatric and substance use disorders. The hope is that by increasing its data, MindMed will be able to better develop its product pipeline.

“In order to build a deeper understanding of the illnesses we seek to treat, we need to better integrate data on the efficacy and efficiency of existing care models as well as patient and provider-related outcomes,” Dr. Daniel Karlin, chief medical officer of MindMed, said in a statement.

“Clinical trials capture a small window of time in a patient's overall experience of their illness. These trials, while essential for drug development, tell us nothing about patients' access to, and use of, various treatment modalities through time. Truly understanding the patient journey by knowing about all relevant encounters and events that lie outside of the limited window of clinical trials will enable us to better develop and deploy therapeutics that offer new hope for people who are suffering."