Objective Assessment of Vocal Tremor

Jacob Peplinski, Visar Berisha, Julie Liss, Shira Hahn, Jeremy Shefner, Seward Rutkove, Kristin Qi, Kerisa Shelton

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

Detecting early signs of neurodegeneration is vital for planning treatments for neurological diseases. Speech plays an important role in this context because it has been shown to be a promising early indicator of neurological decline, and because it can be acquired remotely without the need for specialized hardware. Typically, symptoms are characterized by clinicians using subjective and discrete scales. The poor resolution and subjectivity of these scales can make the earliest speech changes hard to detect. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the objective assessment of vocal tremor, a phenomenon associated with many neurological disorders. The algorithm extracts and aggregates a feature set from the average spectra of the energy and fundamental frequency profiles of a sustained phonation. We show that the resultant low-dimensional feature set reliably classifies healthy controls and patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis perceptually rated for tremor by speech language pathologists.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2019 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages6386-6390
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781479981311
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2019
Event44th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2019 - Brighton, United Kingdom
Duration: May 12 2019May 17 2019

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
Volume2019-May
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Conference

Conference44th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityBrighton
Period5/12/195/17/19

Keywords

  • Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)
  • Dysarthria
  • Speech
  • Tremor

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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