학술논문

Towards robust paralinguistic assessment for real-world mobile health (mHealth) monitoring: an initial study of reverberation effects on speech
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
Computer Science - Sound
Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Audio and Speech Processing
Language
Abstract
Speech is promising as an objective, convenient tool to monitor health remotely over time using mobile devices. Numerous paralinguistic features have been demonstrated to contain salient information related to an individual's health. However, mobile device specification and acoustic environments vary widely, risking the reliability of the extracted features. In an initial step towards quantifying these effects, we report the variability of 13 exemplar paralinguistic features commonly reported in the speech-health literature and extracted from the speech of 42 healthy volunteers recorded consecutively in rooms with low and high reverberation with one budget and two higher-end smartphones and a condenser microphone. Our results show reverberation has a clear effect on several features, in particular voice quality markers. They point to new research directions investigating how best to record and process in-the-wild speech for reliable longitudinal health state assessment.
Comment: Accepted for publication at Interspeech 2023