our voice changes when we don’t get enough sleep, study finds

A third of French people are sleep deprived, which is not always perceptible in the tone of their voice and the rate of speech.

Will we soon have some kind of stethoscope to detect lack of sleep? This is the hope raised by the work of French researchers, published Thursday March 13, who were interested not in the sound of our heart, but in the sound of our voice. This changes when we don’t get enough sleep.

A research team, notably involving the CNRS, and the universities of Paris and Marseille, was able to show that a sleep deficit can be heard if we are helped by artificial intelligence to analyze the voice. For this research, 22 volunteers were recorded reading extracts from novels aloud. The recording took place before and after two deliberately shortened nights. The artificial intelligence was able to differentiate between the rested voice and the voice after sleep deprivation. Results which resonate particularly on Friday March 15, the date of the 24th International Sleep Day.

Less than six hours of sleep per night

A person who is deprived of sleep no longer has the same tone of voice, nor the same rate of speech, nor the same intonations. These are individual variations, which are not necessarily audible to us, but a computer can detect it. Other tests will be necessary to confirm these results, but this study makes it possible to consider the development of new tools to detect sleep deficit in a patient, which today is done either by complex examinations or by declarative way with the number of hours of sleep, or the appearance of signs of drowsiness. For the authors, this analysis of vocal characteristics could be used to develop a sort of sleep stethoscope in a few years. A simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive test.

Lack of sleep is becoming more and more widespread. It also has serious consequences. A third of French people have a sleep deficit and sleep less than six hours per night, a figure that has tripled in 10 years. This lack of sleep is associated with an increased risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, inflammation and even cancer. It can also influence our memory and our mood. A Bordeaux University Hospital study among hospital workers showed, for example, that those who get enough sleep are 2.5 times less likely to become depressed or suffer burnout.