This Call for Papers on "Voice Phenotyping and Vocal Biomarkers" is seeking high-quality submissions on a leading-edge field that uses voice and speech analysis to advance the detection, monitoring, and treatment of health conditions.
This e-collection focuses on acoustic and voice analysis techniques, voice or vocal phenotyping, and vocal biomarkers in health and medicine. Human speech and voice signals may be an underused source of data that offers clinically meaningful insights into an individual’s health and well-being. Recent advances in signal processing and computational tools in this field offer a pathway toward developing, evaluating, and even integrating vocal biomarkers into clinical or community settings.
We invite the submission of high-quality original research that explores the potential of voice and speech analysis in diverse medical applications. We are particularly interested in submissions that explore novel methodologies and address key challenges in this field.
Submissions to this Call for Papers may explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Development and validation of novel algorithms, computational methods, or devices to support the field of voice analysis in health and medicine, including, for example, multimodal fusion techniques combining voice data with other modalities
- Experiments and applications for disease diagnosis, surveillance, or monitoring (eg, evaluating voice characteristics or types, such as the stress-lability of speech and utterances as a potential biomarker for well-being, mental health, disease, and cognition)
- Creation, curation, and sharing of voice datasets, ontologies, or taxonomies for medical research, which might also include computational modeling of speech and voice production as a biological process
- Applications of computational tools for voice analysis in health and medicine, including but not limited to machine learning, deep phenotyping, artificial intelligence, or other approaches
- Challenges of bias, privacy, and data security in the collection and analysis of voice data for health purposes
- Studies on the patient experience of using ambient or ubiquitous voice technologies in their diagnosis or care management
- Voice biomarkers in pediatric development, for example, early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders in children, monitoring of language or cognitive development, or monitoring of autism spectrum conditions
- Early detection and monitoring of the progression of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer and Parkinson disease, or the detection of aging and frailty through voice biomarkers
- Screening and monitoring of psychiatric conditions, such as depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and sleep disorders; pain conditions; or fatigue syndromes
- Detection and monitoring of respiratory illnesses (eg, COVID-19, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and cardiovascular diseases
- Investigations into the physiological, anatomical, and neurological mechanisms that link voice production to health and disease
We welcome all article type submissions, including original research papers, research letters, short papers, tutorials, systematic or scoping literature reviews, or viewpoints. A full list of potential article types is available here.
How to Submit
To submit an article to JMIR Biomedical Engineering, please visit the submission page. Consult our instructions for authors for more information on how to submit a manuscript.
Submission Information
All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review, and accepted articles will be published as part of the “Voice Phenotyping and Vocal Biomarkers” e-collection. Submissions not reviewed or accepted for publication in this JMIR Biomedical Engineering e-collection may be offered a cascading peer review or a transfer to other JMIR Publications journals, according to standard publisher policies. Authors are encouraged to submit study protocols or grant proposals to JMIR Research Protocols before data acquisition to preregister the study (Registered Reports—subsequent acceptance in one of the JMIR Publications journals is then guaranteed).
All articles submitted to this e-collection will be shared and published rapidly through the following mechanisms:
- All peer-reviewed articles in this e-collection will be immediately and permanently made open access. This is the standard for all titles within the JMIR Publications portfolio.
- Articles can be made immediately available in JMIR Preprints (with a DOI) after submission if authors select the preprint option to enable this service.
Submission Deadline
October 1, 2025