According to Cigna’s 360 Well-Being Survey, 83 percent of individuals are anxious, with 13 percent expressing “unmanageable” stress levels. StressWaves, a computerized tool developed by Cigna, analyses voices to identify stress levels. Cigna has dubbed mental health and stress “the next global health pandemic,” and this move aims to address them.
- Stress level: Developed alongside Ellipsis Health, StressWaves analyzes acoustics and voice patterns to both determine a user’s stress level and alert them of possible effects associated with it. Users answer questions over 90 seconds as the program analyzes results.
- Advanced AI: Cigna has worked with Ellipsis Health to deploy their unique and advanced AI technology to offer people the chance to assess stress through voice detection. The decision-support tool builds upon over 20 years of research and is based on training a dataset of over 15,000 adults aged from 18-80+, to ensure the algorithms are robust enough to cater to different populations with varying accents and levels of English-speaking ability.
- Accessibility: The Cigna StressWaves Test was developed with accessibility in mind. In addition to design considerations for age, sex, and education level, the free online test is also interoperable with various systems and on any electronic device, if there is a microphone and internet connection.
- Open-ended: StressWaves Test is the only tool that analyses stress through acoustic (sounds, such as tone, pitch, pause, etc.) and semantic (word choices and syntax) patterns. Users are invited to answer open-ended, low-stigma questions for 90 seconds and are then provided with a visualization of their stress. The test will not retain the voice recordings once they have been used to produce the stress measurements.
- Health issues: The recent Cigna 360 Well-Being Survey, published in June, highlighted the growing importance of mental health as part of overall health and well-being. Additionally, the research found that 83% of people reported being stressed, with 13% experiencing unmanageable stress.