In a fast-changing world, machines can now make decisions traditionally reserved for humans. While this might seem frightening, but the truth is that technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to improve our lives significantly. AI has already made an impact on multiple industries, including medicine. Compared to $2.16 billion in 2017, it’s estimated that the global value of AI in healthcare will reach $22.79 billion by 2023.

We have previously seen how Stanford’s solution detects abnormalities based on photos. In a step ahead, an AI system called Corti accomplishes the same by simply listening. Designed to detect a heart attack during an emergency call and share the information with the dispatcher, Corti does this by harnessing the power of machine learning. By doing so, it can analyze the caller’s voice and recognize background noise, helping emergency dispatchers identify heart attacks more efficiently.

The system analyzed over 170,000 calls during testing. One call came from a woman who reported that a man had fallen from a building and broken his neck. Corti detected noise such as gasping and faint rattling sounds in the background while listening carefully, identifying that the man was experiencing a heart attack. Currently used only in Copenhagen, it is expected to be deployed in other European countries in 2019. Contrary to the argument that Corti could eventually replace human dispatchers, Corti’s co-founder, Andreas Cleve Lohmann, states that “this is a human augmentation tool, not a human replacement tool.”