The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $1.4 million grant to a Scottsdale startup that is developing an analytics tool for clinical speech language pathologists.
The grant gives Aural Analytics new help in its mission to create a tool that measures speech signals that could be missed by speech language pathologists using just their ears. More accurate measurement can help specialists identify neurological health problems such as diseases or injuries before other symptoms emerge.
“The timing of this grant couldn’t be better because it further fuels Aural Analytics’ Speech Vitals technology to measure speech,” said Judy Smythe, CEO of Aural Analytics, in a statement. “We have built our clinical speech analytics technology pipeline from the ground up and are now focused on validating our metrics against clinical benchmarks.”
This isn’t the first NIH grant the company has received. According to Business Journal research, Aural Analytics received nearly $225,000 in 2019.
Aural Analytics also raised $4.3 million in seed funding in 2019 and at the time planned to use that money to expand its clinical trial platform to support easy speech collection and analytics around the world.
“Today, Speech Vitals is being used in 30 concurrent clinical studies, a signal not just of the trend of mining speech, but Aural Analytics’ place at the forefront of it,” Smythe said in the statement.
Founded in 2015 as a spinoff from Arizona State University, the company is building on research that had been underway for 25 years prior to that by co-founder and ASU professor Julie Liss.
Former Raytheon principal research engineer and ASU professor Visar Berisha, also an Aural Analytics co-founder, helped to build the sound technology that taps into the physics of speech signals important to clinical decision makers. Daniel Jones, the company's former CEO, was also a co-founder.
NIH describes itself as the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world and says it invests more than $32 billion a year to enhance life, and reduce illness and disability.
