Smartphones Offer New Opportunities in Clinical Voice Research

Summary Smartphone technology provides new opportunities for recording standardized voice samples of patients and sending the files by e-mail to the voice laboratory. This drastically improves the collection of baseline data, as used in research on efficiency of voice treatments. However, the basic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of voice 2017-01, Vol.31 (1), p.111.e1-111.e7
Main Authors: Manfredi, C, Lebacq, J, Cantarella, G, Schoentgen, J, Orlandi, S, Bandini, A, DeJonckere, P.H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics - instrumentation
baseline design
Biomedical Research - instrumentation
dysphonia
Email
Fundamental frequency
Harmonics
Humans
Jitter
Materials Testing
Mobile Applications
Mobile phones
Noise
Otolaryngology
Patients
Predictive Value of Tests
Reproducibility of Results
Shimmer
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Smartphone
Sound Spectrography
Speech Acoustics
Speech Production Measurement - instrumentation
Speech-Language Pathology - instrumentation
synthetic voices
voice assessment
Voice Disorders - diagnosis
Voice Disorders - physiopathology
Voice Disorders - therapy
Voice Quality
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Summary:Summary Smartphone technology provides new opportunities for recording standardized voice samples of patients and sending the files by e-mail to the voice laboratory. This drastically improves the collection of baseline data, as used in research on efficiency of voice treatments. However, the basic requirement is the suitability of smartphones for recording and digitizing pathologic voices (mainly characterized by period perturbations and noise) without significant distortion. In this experiment, two smartphones (a very inexpensive one and a high-level one) were tested and compared with direct microphone recordings in a soundproof room. The voice stimuli consisted in synthesized deviant voice samples (median of fundamental frequency: 120 and 200 Hz) with three levels of jitter and three levels of added noise. All voice samples were analyzed using PRAAT software. The results show high correlations between jitter, shimmer, and noise-to-harmonics ratio measured on the recordings via both smartphones, the microphone, and measured directly on the sound files from the synthesizer. Smartphones thus appear adequate for reliable recording and digitizing of pathologic voices.
ISSN:0892-1997
1873-4588
DOI:10.1016/j.jvoice.2015.12.020