Dr. Tue Te, assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA Health, has been awarded a five-year K23 Career Development Award from the National Institute of Health (NIH)/National Institute on Aging totaling $845,100. Her project, titled “Advancing Early Detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Dementia through Digital Biomarkers,” will run from September 2026 to May 2031. This project will investigate how spontaneous speech, voice signals, and sleep measures can be used as signals to predict subtle signs of cognitive impairment in real-world clinical settings.
“Speech and voice analysis offers a promising, non-invasive tool in medical research,” said Te. “We know from our previous research that there is a connection between verbal response time and hidden sleepiness – an important factor in cognitive assessment. By measuring the specific biomarkers between vocal cues and sleep, we can create a scalable approach for the early detection of cognitive decline.”
Specific aims of this project will be to: assess the feasibility and acceptability of collecting and analyzing spontaneous voice data during outpatient visits; develop machine learning models that use voice and speech features to distinguish mild cognitive impairment from normal cognition; and explore associations between voice features and sleepiness, testing whether voice-based measures predict sleepiness comparable to EEG-based assessments.
