For millions of people living with diabetes, constant monitoring of their blood sugar levels is a pain — literally. They have to stick their fingers throughout the day to get a blood sample.
However, scientists say they’ve found a way to avoid that: listening to a patient’s voice.
At play is something called Hooke’s law. A person’s vocal folds vary in tension, mass and length in response to their body’s glucose levels, pitching their voice up slightly.
Very slightly: A .02 Hz increase in pitch, in fact, far too slight for a human ear to notice.
The researchers out of Canada, however, tested a phone app that required test subjects to record their voices throughout the day, along with testing their blood sugar with a Freestyle Libre system, a wearable patch that wirelessly logs their blood glucose.
The scientists found that analysis of the voice recordings tracked with the ebbs and flows of glucose levels as detected by the wearable.
They allow that much more study into their findings is needed, but someday testing one’s blood sugar could be just a recording away.