Connectional Silence Sensor

This invention is a confidential and automated sensor that can detect connectional silence in serious illness conversations in the hospital setting, functioning as an important real-time measuring tool for the quality of healthcare communication.

Technology overview: 

This invention aims to help improve the quality of healthcare communication, particularly regarding serious illness conversations with patients. This sensor can detect an important feature in these conversations, connectional silence, which reflects empathy, understanding, or emotional connection and is associated with improved patient outcomes. This sensor is designed to be used as an app that records brief audio clips, identifies pauses, transforms them into visual data (called Gammatonegrams), and then deletes the original audio to keep everything confidential. In less than five seconds, it can process and store de-identified data for later analysis, allowing healthcare teams to measure connection and compassion at scale for the first time. This breakthrough makes it possible to automatically track one of the most important predictors of patient well-being: whether patients feel truly heard and understood.

Key Advantages:

• Non-intrusive, fully confidential analysis of clinical conversations
• Detects and measures moments of genuine human connection
• Provides scalable, automated communication quality metrics

Problems Solved: 

• Removes the need for slow manual communication analysis
• Enables large-scale, real-time quality measurement in healthcare

Applications

• Palliative and serious illness care programs
• Hospital quality assurance and performance metrics

Seeking

• Licensing and development partners