Towards robust paralinguistic assessment for real-world mobile health (mHealth) monitoring: an initial study of reverberation effects on speech

TY - CHAP

T1 - Towards robust paralinguistic assessment for real-world mobile health (mHealth) monitoring: an initial study of reverberation effects on speech

AU - Dineley, Judith

AU - Carr, Ewan

AU - Matcham, Faith

AU - Downs, Johnny

AU - Dobson, Richard

AU - Quatieri, Thomas F.

AU - Cummins, Nicholas

N1 - Funding Information: We thank our participants for their support and the KCL Department of Psychology for the use of their test rooms. This work was supported by the MRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) King's College London 2021 (MR/X502923/1) and the EPSRC IAA King's College London 2022 (EP/X525571/1). This paper also represents independent research part funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London and supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. Views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Dept. of Health and Social Care. For T.F. Quatieri: Material is approved for public release, distribution is unlimited, and is based upon work supported by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Funding Information: We thank our participants for their support and the KCL Department of Psychology for the use of their test rooms. This work was supported by the MRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) King's College London 2021 (MR/X502923/1) and the EPSRC IAA King's College London 2022 (EP/X525571/1). This paper also represents independent research part funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London and supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. Views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Dept. of Health and Social Care. For T.F. Quatieri: Material is approved for public release, distribution is unlimited, and is based upon work supported by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 International Speech Communication Association. All rights reserved.

PY - 2023/8/15

Y1 - 2023/8/15

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - measurement error

KW - reproducibility

KW - acoustic environment

KW - paralinguistics

KW - mobile health

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85171524961&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-947

DO - 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-947

M3 - Conference paper

VL - 2023-August

SP - 2373

EP - 2377

BT - ISCA Archive

PB - International Speech Communication Association

T2 - 24th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association

Y2 - 20 August 2023 through 24 August 2023

ER -