The Science
The science behind the voice.
Voice is a continuous, involuntary readout of your autonomic nervous system, respiratory mechanics and neurological state. Biota1 listens to what your body is actually saying.
Premise
Why voice?
Every time you speak, your vocal cords vibrate under the influence of vagal tone, diaphragm mechanics, laryngeal muscle tension, and cortical arousal. These forces leave measurable signatures in your acoustic output. Micro-variations in pitch, harmonic structure, breathing patterns, timing.
No sensor placed on the skin can access the biomechanics of phonation. Voice is the only non-invasive window into these systems.
The Pipeline
From sound
to signal.
Tap any stage below to follow how 30 seconds of speech becomes 48+ wellness biomarkers, without ever leaving the device.
Anatomy
A direct line
to your nervous system.
The vagus nerve innervates the larynx directly. State changes propagate through phonation in milliseconds.
Anatomical map
The vagal pathway.
Physiological readings · live
Your body,
read from a sentence.
Thirty seconds of speech produces a full physiological snapshot — heart rate, HRV, respiratory mechanics, cortisol rhythm, cognitive load, hydration. No cuff. No electrode. No skin contact.
Heart rate · resting
68 BPM
Inferred from vocal micro-tremor & subglottal pressure
HRV proxy · 14-day
68 ms RMSSD
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia, acoustically derived
Respiratory
Cognitive load
Low — disfluency rate within baseline
Cortisol proxy · diurnal
Healthy curve
Cortisol awakening response detected · normal evening decline
Hydration
Mucosal resonance · vocal fold lubrication
SAM suggests +200ml across afternoon.
Acoustic feature map
48+ features per check-in.
MFCC · jitter · shimmer · F0 · formants · HNR · prosody
48+ measured
What we measure.
Eight wellness domains. Over fifty-two acoustic and derived features per check-in. Click any row.
Core acoustic measures of phonation quality and vocal fold stability.
Example markers. Fundamental frequency (F0), jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio
Validation
AUC by domain
Peer-reviewed study submitted to Frontiers in Digital Health (Manuscript ID 1813478). Co-authored by Dr Adrian Attard Trevisan, Andrea Sprio, and Prof. Frederick R. Carrick.
Architecture
Privacy is not a feature.
It is the architecture.
On-Device Only
All AI inference runs on the embedded edge processor. Audio never leaves the device.
No Audio Upload
BLE transmission contains only numerical biomarker values. Voice is discarded on-chip.
GDPR by Design
Architected from the ground up to be GDPR-compliant. No personal audio data to breach.