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“I hear you are sick” is about to take on a whole new meaning. AI is adding a new level of functionality to bioacoustics, the combination of biology and acoustics, to gather health insights from sounds produced by humans.

“From cough to speech and even breath, the sounds our bodies make are filled with information about our health,” Google Research Director of Engineering Shravya Shetty said in an August 19 blog posting. “Subtle clues hidden within these bioacoustic sounds hold the potential to revolutionize how we screen, diagnose, monitor and manage a wide range of health conditions like tuberculosis (TB) or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).”

Earlier this year Google introdued Health Acoustic Representations, or HeAR, a bioacoustic foundation model designed to help researchers build models that can listen to human sounds and flag early signs of disease. The Google Research team trained HeAR on 300 million pieces of audio data curated from a diverse and de-identified dataset, and trained the cough model in particular, using roughly 100 million cough sounds.

In August Google announced that it is working with India’s Salcit Technologies, a Hyderabad-based healthcare company that uses AI to analyze cough sounds and assess lung health. The Indian company is exploring how HeAR can help expand the capabilities of its bioacoustic AI models. To start, it is using HeAR to help research and enhance their early detection of TB based on cough sounds.
It is one example of how sound-based generative AI systems could democratize early disease detection, making screening accessible, affordable and scalable.

Read on to learn more about this story and other important technology news impacting business.

In her latest exclusive column for The Innovator Kay Firth-Butterfield, the former head of AI at The World Economic Forum. discusses how to combat disinformation.

The World Economic Forum has ranked disinformation as one of the top risks in 2024. The size of the problem and what to do about it is is why she decided to do a follow-up, with the help of deepfake and synthetic media expert, Henry Adjer, to her July column on deepfakes. Although the two issues are often linked, disinformation deserves to be treated as a category of its own.

AI has already played a significant role in disinformation campaigns across the world, from trying to manipulate Indian voters to altering perceptions about the war in Ukraine.When abused for political manipulation, the capability of deepfakes to fabricate convincing disinformation, could result in voter abstention, swaying elections, societal polarization, discrediting public figures, and inciting geopolitical tensions. Another negative impact is the so-called “liar’s dividend”: when people can’t discern the truth, they don’t trust what they see anymore, even when its authentic. The theory is that when people learn that deepfakes are increasingly realistic, false claims that real content is AI-generated become more persuasive too.

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Resourcify, a B2B digital waste management, recycling, and sustainability platform, connects global companies with local recyclers to optimize their sorting and recycling, reduce costs, and increase the reuse of products and materials. The German scale-up’s customers include IKEA, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson.

Think of it as a digital operating system for a circular future, says Angeley Mullins, the company’s chief commercial officer. “We can turn waste into valuable resources by harnessing the power of recycling,” she says.

Today only 17.6% of recycled materials make it back into the production cycle. Some 50% of recyclables are incinerated due to incorrect sorting and some 95% of material value is lost. This is due, in part, to how difficult it is to control waste at scale, according to Resourcify. The market is complicated and fragmented: In the EU there are an estimated 20,000 recyclers, handling 842 waste streams and 97% of it is processed off-line.
European companies need to comply with the EU's Corporate Sustainability directive by 2030 and to be able to supply detailed information by next year. The German scale-up aggregates all waste data into a single platform, including waste volumes per material stream, volumes for hazardous/non-hazardous waste, C02 impact of waste management and total recycling rates.

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