US-based Cigna International has announced the launch of the Cigna StressWaves Test, a free online tool that analyses acoustic and semantic voice patterns to evaluate stress levels.

The StressWaves Test was created in partnership with Ellipsis Health, a medical technology developer and leader in artificial intelligent (AI) health and vocal biomarkers.

The StressWaves Test will reveal the user's stress level, ranging from 'Extremely Stressed' to 'No Stress', along with a portrait that visualizes the effect of stress on the user's body and mind.

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.

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 for different populations with varying accents and levels of English-speaking ability.