Ten years ago, Jim Schwoebel got a memorable phone call from his mother. She was crying. His brother had been hospitalized after a psychotic break at the age of twenty. Looking back, there had been warning signs: his brother had gone to his primary care physician eleven times complaining of headaches and unclear thoughts. No psychiatric specialist was able to flag his true problem. During that time, Schwoebel took to exploring his collection of eight hundred voicemails from his brother, saved up over the years. As a biomedical engineer and future CEO of NeuroLex Laboratories, Schwoebel wondered if this lengthy verbal record might hold any clues to the speaker’s developing schizophrenia. Could there have been a way to catch this condition in one of those eleven clinic visits, from just subtle changes in his voice?
