DASH - Digital App for Speech & Health Monitoring

Many people living with neurodegenerative conditions such as motor neuron disease, dementia, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease experience speech problems. Using common digital technologies such as smartphone apps, we can record and analyse speech, along with other health information in detail. We aim to provide new information for people living with these conditions, researchers, and healthcare professionals. This study will investigate the use of these digital technologies and speech recordings to help diagnose and monitor these conditions. 

The results may be of benefit to people with neurological conditions in the future. We anticipate that our research will lead to a better understanding of these conditions and could help in producing new and better treatments, tests, and ultimately, preventing neurological conditions. 

This speech consortium brings together a collection of recordings and data from two research projects: the Digital App for Speech and Health Monitoring (DASH), and the NeuroCARE study’s clinical and digital assessments. 

Combining these recordings creates a larger collection of speech data that can be used to support research into speech and health. 

A total of 864 participants have provided more than 5500 recordings in over 1000 assessments. Over 200 of these participants have provided multiple recordings. With the first participants in DASH reaching 2-years of follow-up this month.  The motor neuron disease (MND) and healthy control group recruitment targets have been exceeded.  

In 2026, we also launched a new and improved app for collecting speech recordings, developed in partnership with our collaborator, SpeakUnique. We will continue to collect and study speech recordings from more people with a range of backgrounds and health conditions. This will help us to better understand changes in speech and to eventually move this research closer to being used in everyday healthcare. 

Together with our collaborators SpeakUnique, our early results are encouraging. These first computer models are beginning to identify differences in speech from healthy people and the speech of people living with certain health conditions in our studies.  

Our team has shared this research widely, helping to raise awareness among both healthcare professionals and technology communities. We have presented our research at major international and UK conferences focused on speech technology, and neurological conditions such as motor neuron disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. 

These include: 

• The International Speech Communication Association Conference (Interspeech)

• The European Network to Cure ALS (ENCALS) Meeting

• The Association of British Neurologists (ABN) Annual Meeting

• The Odyssey Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop

• The IEEE International Conference on Acoustics

• Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

• Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC)

• Scottish Dementia Research Consortium (SDRC) Annual Conference

• The Scottish Health and Innovation Conference (SHIC).  

Our teams' efforts have helped raise awareness of our research and help build new collaborations that will help support our aim of developing speech technology that could help improve the diagnosis and monitoring of neurological conditions.  

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