Patent ID: 8200480

Claim:
A method comprising: obtaining, via a plurality of communication devices, a plurality of speech signals respectively associated with human speakers, the speech signals including verbal components and non-verbal components; identifying a plurality of geographical locations, each geographic location associated with a respective one of the plurality of the communication devices; de-identifying the plurality of speech signals so as to preserve the anonymity of the human speaker, wherein de-identifying comprises applying a time-domain scrambling algorithm to the plurality of speech signals, and/or applying time-domain windowing or frequency-domain filtering to the plurality of speech signals; extracting the non-verbal components from the obtained speech signals wherein the non-verbal components comprise speech components that are not derivable from the human language, deducing physiological or psychological conditions of the human speakers by analyzing, over a specified period, the extracted non-verbal components, using predefined relations between characteristics of the non-verbal components and physiological or psychological conditions of the human speakers; and providing a geographical distribution of the deduced physiological or psychological conditions of the human speakers by associating the deduced physiological or psychological conditions of the human speakers with the geographical locations thereof.