TORONTO, January 12, 2022
Winterlight Labs is excited to announce support for three new languages: French, Spanish, and German. Supporting the automated analysis of the linguistic components of speech, such as word categories and grammatical structure, allows us to more accurately capture how speech patterns change with disease, relative to measuring acoustic properties alone. Our research has shown that the linguistic elements of speech are critical to accurately track progression in neurodegenerative and psychiatric conditions. Expanding linguistic support to more languages allows us to support multi-national research studies and to reach more patients.
Our pipeline uses the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework to structure the different linguistic components of each language we support. Universal Dependencies is a widely published, international community effort aiming to develop a cross-linguistically consistent framework for all human languages. UD supports over 100 languages with over 300 contributors.
Winterlight Labs is commercializing a proprietary language-based diagnostic system that analyzes natural speech to detect and monitor dementia, Alzheimer’s, aphasia, and various other cognitive conditions. Winterlight's scalable platform uses short recorded speech samples to analyze hundreds of linguistic cues, and can detect dementia and other conditions with a high level of accuracy. This is a major improvement over current pencil-and-paper tests which are time-consuming, costly, and difficult to administer. The platform has applications in drug trials, long-term and primary care, and speech-language pathology.
Since its founding, Winterlight Labs has seen strong interest from pharmaceutical companies and other potential partners who view the technology as a major improvement over current methods of detection or screening. The company has gained support from the pan-Canadian AGE-WELL Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE), the Ontario Brain Institute, Ontario Centres of Excellence, and the University of Toronto Banting and Best Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For more information, visit www.winterlightlabs.com.
Media Inquiries:
Winterlight Labs
Liam Kaufman, CEO
liam [at] winterlightlabs.com