Novel Digitalized Markers for Screening and Disease Trajectory Tracking in Clinical Trials

Currently, to enroll participants into pharmaceutical trials strenuous and costly procedures are applied to test whether participants meet inclusion criteria or not; this includes travel to clinics, costly brain imaging, invasive assessments, or costly f2f assessments with experts. Moreover, screening for such inclusion criteria in clinical trials has significant fail rates and significant resources have to be spent on participant screening to enroll only a fraction of them (10%). Standard cognitive assessment typically uses a set of speech-based cognitive tests which have the potential to be conducted remotely in telecommunication settings. However, only recently speech analysis and automatic speech recognition, as well as semantic speech processing have become mature enough to automate such speech-based testing procedures. The European DeepSpA project aims to replace in-person manual pre-screening procedures by remote (semi-)automated analyses methods detecting relevant phenotype for novel Alzheimer trials automatically.