"Do I Sound Dehydrated?" Measuring Body Hydration Levels Through Voice

Abstract

To this day, there are no available methods to measure body hydration levels that are accurate, fast, and non-invasive. The current gold standard to measure body hydration requires a blood sample and expensive lab equipment. There are great health benefits attached to knowing one’s own body hydration level - particularly in the world of athletics. Our research focuses on developing a new approach to measuring body hydration through speech analysis. We designed a method to collect vocal characteristics and then built a data set of those characteristics mapped to a corresponding hydration value. After running the data, we found no strong enough correlation between voice and hydration level to prove our hypothesis. However, this new approach offers the opportunity to improve upon our method and make future discoveries.