National Epilepsy Awareness Month (NEAM) is dedicated to raising awareness and understanding about epilepsy. This observance takes place annually in November and has been recognized since 1969 by the Epilepsy Foundation. The purpose of NEAM is to shed light on the challenges faced by the 3.4 million people and their families affected by epilepsy in the United States alone. Despite being one of the oldest known medical conditions, epilepsy continues to face significant public fear and misunderstanding, leading to discrimination, lack of funding for research, and premature deaths among people with epilepsy.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures, which can manifest in various forms and severities. The condition affects mood, sleep patterns, cognitive functions, and social interactions, creating a complex array of challenges for those living with it.

Let’s listen to a 31- to 35-year-old woman with epilepsy describe what it is like to live with the condition:

Question 1, Response 93

Understanding the patient voice is at the heart of 

, which we approach holistically by analyzing what is said, how it’s said, and how it sounds.

To start, let’s jump into what this patient says and how she says it. When describing epilepsy’s impact, she highlights the fear she feels due to epilepsy’s unpredictability – you essentially never know when a seizure will happen (“can come on at any time without warning”).

, we hear and see in the acoustics a dip in the acoustic control (‘dominance’) when she talks about the sudden nature of epilepsy, as well as negative tone (‘valence’) when speaking about the long-lasting impact of seizures (“you are just out of it for the whole day…”). This vocal quality indicates feelings of anxiety or fear, which closely aligns with the language of her response.

Considering both what is being said and how it sounds, this woman makes it clear that epilepsy impacts patients’ emotional well-being and it has effects that reach beyond the moments a seizure happens. Her response an implicit call to action for pharmaceutical companies to continue to develop more effective treatment options that alleviate these burdens.

Our Listening Platform makes it simple for patients to speak with us about their experiences in an open and authentic way and easy for you to engage with their perspectives directly.

If you’re interested in hearing from more patients like this one so that you can gain insight into their experiences, beliefs, behaviors, and desires, 

Discover the impact of epilepsy during National Epilepsy Awareness Month. Explore patient insights, challenges, and the importance of amplifying their voices for better understanding and treatment advancements.

In Recognition of National Epilepsy Awareness Month (November)

Listening is at the heart of what we do at inVibe. Thanks to the combined efforts of our Product and Research teams, we’re able to listen to and analyze our voices responses more efficiently and more insightfully than ever. Together, the partnership between our teams helps us improve our client offerings. Recently, we’ve been able to release new features that address:

Faster access to key findings and summaries

More versatile ways to listen to and share findings

Faster Access to Key Findings & Data Summaries

To help our clients get to the heart of what matters sooner, our dashboard now has a new AI-search feature that automatically summarizes findings and identifies key insights in real time. Clients can now access high-level insights almost instantly, as well as use a chat feature to search and query the data. Importantly, our AI-search tool is not only designed to think like our analysts, but it even cites its sources like we do, making it easy for clients to track key insights and find relevant voices that speak to specific business questions.

Key Findings

The addition of AI-driven search and prompts within our dashboard has made it faster and easier to query data, verify findings, pull sample quotes, and generate new hypotheses. With advancements happening rapidly in the world of AI models, we’ve committed to ensuring the models we use are in fact the most accurate and align with our research process. Also, early on in development, we noticed challenges with AI hallucinations, lack of formatting, and missing sources that led to less-than-ideal outputs. In that spirit, our Product and Research teams routinely partner to rate and evaluate how AI models answer prompts, generate, key findings, and provide outputs of the highest quality and in the most useful format. This process helps us ensure the AI tools we use are truly the best options for us and our clients.

More Versatile Ways to Listen to and Share Findings

While AI-search and summary has helped clients find insights faster, we also wanted to ensure it helped them 

 those insights in an engaging way. With that goal in mind, our dashboard now includes a tool that transforms your research into dynamic, narrated video presentations at the click of a button. The "Make a Presentation" tool uses AI to generate a multimedia video, combining key findings from your project or data query with authentic voice clips from your research participants. By clicking through the module, you can customize every aspect - from selecting relevant participant quotes and insights to customizing the voice over script. In a matter of minutes, you'll have a professionally narrated video presentation that weaves together data insights and real participant voices, ready to download and share with stakeholders.

Make Presentation

While we’ve been busy advancing our dashboard and analytics, there is more to come – from a better way to search data from multiple projects at once to a configurable project request tool to making starting research with easier – the team is always looking to improve our customers’ experience via our internal partnerships. As Amit Ray said, “Collaboration is the essence of life. The wind, bees, and flowers work together to spread pollen.” In past roles, I’ve seen technology and research teams operate separately, even though both are essential to client success. But here, watching our Product and Research teams collaborate has shown me the power of true synergy. This environment pushes us to think in new ways, build something larger than any single project, and innovate thoughtfully. And it’s this spirit of collaboration that allows us to deliver deeper insights and lasting value to our clients.

We’d love to collaborate with you on your research needs! 

 about how the inVibe team can help you accomplish your business objectives, and even take a tour of the exciting new dashboard features allowing for better, faster research.

Discover how inVibe's Product & Research teams collaborate to deliver faster insights through AI-powered features, improved analytics, and innovative presentation tools.

How inVibe’s Product & Research Teams Make Research Faster & Easier

Enhancing Insights Through Collaboration

Family caregivers play a significant role in healthcare, tending to the needs of someone with short- or long-term limitations due to injury, illness, or disability. As of 2023, the CDC found that there are 53 million adults in the US providing care for a spouse, elderly parent or relative, or special-needs child. This can be especially challenging for those who are 

both raising their children and caring for their parents

Caregivers provide loved ones with assistance with a variety of daily activities like eating, bathing, dressing, taking medications, transportation, as well as offering companionship and emotional support.

Being a caregiver involves navigating a range of challenges, from isolation to financial strain, time management, lack of privacy, and emotional stress and burnout.

Let’s listen to a 41- to 45-year-old woman describe her experience care and some of the challenges she faces.

Q7, R3

Looking first at what she is saying and how, this patient conveys the difficulty of balancing caregiving activities with taking care of her own needs. She communicates this by repeatedly switching between descriptions of tasks for caregiving and tasks for herself. For example, “giving as much time as I can to all those people” while also needing to schedule her own doctors’ appointments and taking her own medication. She contrasts budgeting time and resources “to care for my loved one” and being able to “pay my own bills.” In this way, she illustrates the balancing act of providing care for another as well as herself.

She identifies resources that she wishes were available to help alleviate these challenges, including better communication between providers to ensure there is a holistic care plan and alleviate the logistical burden of having to make “several different phone calls” to coordinate everyone. This implicitly conveys her desire to both improve her loved one’s care as well as her own experience providing care.

, she describes her experience with negative emotionality (‘valence’), which emphasizes how challenging it is to care for herself in addition to caring for others. The negative valence hits its lowest points when she is discussing time management, taking care of her own needs, paying her own bills, and coordinating care. This highlights the frustration she feels and the lack of resources available to support her with these challenges.



Taking the ‘what’ and ‘how’ together, this response conveys how challenging it can be to be a caregiver, especially as they face the complex struggle of balancing their own needs with that of their loved ones. Listening to and understanding the voices of caregivers can enable us to design more effective and empathetic ways to not only support them, but also to empower them.

Explore the challenges of family caregiving through a caregiver's personal story. Learn how understanding caregiver experiences can lead to better support systems and resources.

In Celebration of National Family Caregiver’s Month (November)

World Psoriasis Day is a global initiative held annually on October 29, aiming to raise awareness about psoriasis, a chronic autoimmune condition that affects millions worldwide. This day is hosted by the International Federation of Psoriasis Associations (IFPA) and is observed in more than 50 countries globally, with the goals of educating the public on psoriasis, raising research funds, combating myths, and highlighting the psychological impacts of the condition.

Psoriasis causes the rapid buildup of skin cells, resulting in red, scaly patches that can appear anywhere on the body. The condition can be physically uncomfortable and emotionally distressing, affecting self-esteem and daily life activities.

Let’s listen to a 51- to 55-year-old man with psoriasis describe what it feels like for him to live with this condition and how it impacts his daily life.

Question 1, Response 54

Let’s look at what this patient is saying and how he’s saying it. When describing his symptom experience, he highlights the on-going visible nature of his symptoms, which are not only an appearance issue from his perspective, but also can be painful.

, as he is talking about itching and trying to “hide it from people,” the acoustic control (‘dominance’) in his voice drops, which further works to accentuate the lack of control he feels to manage and hide his symptoms.

Considering both what is being said and how it sounds, this patient’s response highlights how the impacts of psoriasis are not only physical, but emotional as well. Listening can help us establish empathy and compassion, as well as make patient-centered decisions

Explore a patient's raw perspective on living with psoriasis, and learn how voice analysis reveals both physical and emotional impacts of this chronic skin condition.

In Honor of World Psoriasis Day (Oct 29)

You may be surprised to learn that there is often very little silence in conversation. When we speak, the typical gap between one person finishing what they are saying and the next person starting to speak is tiny, measuring just one fifth of a second on average. In fact, many times these gaps aren’t present at all, and speakers talk over each other and overlap their speech.

Since we are used to such short silences between conversational turns, anything longer than that is noticeable. The more time someone takes to reply, the more it seems like the silence is purposeful, conveying something by saying nothing at all.

“Do you want to go out for coffee with me?”

 linguists have found that an acceptance or a “

” often occurs quicker, with barely a pause at all between the question and the reply. By contrast, someone who is going to decline or say “

” tends to delay their rejection. Even a pause of half a second can be enough to indicate that they are probably not going to agree to go out to coffee with you.

Depending on context, silence can convey a wide variety of meanings, including avoidance of a subject, lack of knowledge, agreement, disagreement, indignation, disappointment, confusion, hesitation, and so on. By paying attention to these pauses, we at inVibe are able to more accurately interpret nuances in qualitative data.

Let’s dig into a relevant example. When a participant in qualitative research (including our own) is asked a question, there can often be a gap before they begin their answer. This could indicate that they are at a loss for words or speechless. It could also mean they are about to share something emotionally heavy, conveying deep feeling. Or it could simply be a sign that they are hesitating, trying to think of an answer to a particularly tricky question.

In our conference intelligence projects specifically, we find that the presence of long pauses and silence can indicate a lack of certainty on a topic. When they feel more uncertain, HCPs tend to pause more throughout their responses.

Take, for example, this HCP describing his typical treatment approach for non-small cell lung cancer patients.

HCP Audiogram 1

You can hear from the speed and fluency of his speech that this HCP is very certain of his treatment approach. The sentences almost appear to run into each other, with very little breath between them.

However, more pauses and hesitation appear in this same HCP’s responses later in the study when he reacts to new data released at the conference.

HCP Audiogram 2

We can hear the pause length increasing almost from the very beginning of this HCP’s response. After saying that the abstract was “very interesting,” he pauses for half of a second before he shares a more hesitant reaction, saying he would only use this regimen with “some patients” and that he is “still on the fence.” This pause clues us into his uncertainty, prefacing his negative evaluation that follows.

We see this hesitation come up again later in the response as well. When he begins to say that he 

be willing to try the combination, this is followed by a long pause before he clarifies that it’s “not data supported.” This pause – among other linguistic markers – indicates that these results will likely not affect this HCP’s current treatment choices.

In this context, listening to every response for signs of hesitation (including pauses) allows us to recommend concrete messaging strategies to encourage broad uptake of a client’s novel treatment across patient types.

By expanding our analyses beyond what is said to how it sounds, our trained linguists at inVibe are better able to interpret HCPs’ and patients’ beliefs, attitudes, and intended meanings. That’s why we listen to every response to every question.

 to learn more about how our listening team can help you to accomplish your business objectives!

In Recognition of National Epilepsy Awareness Month (November)

Enhancing Insights Through Collaboration

In Celebration of National Family Caregiver’s Month (November)

In Honor of World Psoriasis Day (Oct 29)

Why We Listen, Part 2: Silences

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