Title
Phonation biomechanic analysis of Alzheimer's Disease cases
Abstract
Speech production in patients suffering of dementias of Alzheimer¿s type is known to experience noticeable changes with respect to normative speakers. Classically this kind of speech has been described as presenting altered prosody, rhythmic pace, anomy, or impaired semantics. Phonation, conceived as the production of voice in voiced speech fragments remains as an unexplored field. The aim of the present paper is to open a preliminary study presenting biomechanical estimates from phonation produced by two patients (male and female) suffering Alzheimer¿s Disease (AD), contrasted on two controls of both genders (CS: control speakers). A vocal fold biomechanical model is inverted to facilitate estimates of the vocal fold stiffness to analyze significant segments of phonated speech as long vowels and fillers. The estimates of both the AD patients and CS subjects are contrasted on a database of phonation features from a normative speaker population of both genders, as well as in paired tests contrasting AD and CS subjects. Results show the possibility of establishing significant discrimination between AD and CS when using f0, as well as vocal fold body stiffness, although this last feature seems to be more relevant and shows larger statistical significance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.neucom.2015.03.087
Neurocomputing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Speech processing,Cognitive disease monitoring,Neurodegenerative speech modeling,Aging-care,e-Health systems
Prosody,Population,Speech processing,Artificial intelligence,Audiology,Phonation,Speech production,Disease,Pattern recognition,Normative,Speech recognition,Rhythm,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
167
C
0925-2312
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.40
7
Authors
8