Insights Success The 10 Best E-Healthcare Solution Provider Compani | Page 33

I
n the individuals with the major
depressive disorder, a
neurophysiological change that
emphasizes the actions, feelings, and
thoughts associated with bodily events
such as the firing of nerve cells in the
brain or the release of hormones often
alter motor control. Thus, this affects
the mechanisms of controlling speech
production and facial expression.
These fluctuations are related to
psychomotor retardation, a condition
marked by slowed neuromoto r output
that is behaviorally manifested as
altered coordination and timing across
multiple motor-based properties.
Vocal-biomarkers is a technique that
enables machines to understand
human emotions by analyzing,
recording and detecting raw voice
intonations as people speak.
Biomarkers in the voice of a person
have been linked to disorders such as
depression, coronary artery disease,
and anxiety.
By decoding the human vocal
intonations into their underlying
emotions in real-time, this technology
enables the applications and solutions,
voice-powered devices to interact at
the emotional level, just as humans
do. This platform is designed to
generate unprecedented persistent and
passive health awareness to enable
and enhance holistic patient
management. It measures the features
of speech but does not require the
contents of the speech, therefore
protecting privacy.
Vocal biomarkers are tools that use
voice-input to give a clear insight into
a person’s health conditions. It allows
non-invasive, effective and fast
diagnosis unlike blood tests, MRI/CT-
scans, to detect serious conditions.
Various aspects of a person’s voice
December 2017
can help analyze the mental and
physical well-being of the person.
This tool has tremendous potential to
turnaround diagnostic-procedures in
terms of speed, accuracy and cost-
effectiveness. Moreover, the voice-
based diagnosis does not expose
patients to radiations and therefore are
safe in all other perspectives.
Self-diagnosis is an app away
The emergence of vocal-test
applications on smartphones or other
voice-enabled devices as a low-cost
screening option helps to identify
people with heart diseases and other
disorders. These user-friendly
applications will enhance the
possibility of self-diagnosis and help
patients and their kin to know
potential health risks in advance.
To understand the dimensions of
emotions in human communications,
i.e., people’s moods, attitudes, and
emotional characteristics – also
known as personalities this technology
allows devices and applications to
understand not just what we type,
click, say, or touch, but what we mean
and how we feel.
Speech as a Biomarker
A neurological disorder leaves a
fingerprint in voice and speech
production. Speech signal analysis can
deliver clinical information that can be
used to foresee certain diseases,
provide information about the
neurological position of specific
diseases, and assess to disease
progression or the effectiveness of
treatment regimens. The most
common method to assess the motor
speech characteristics associated with
neurological disease diagnosis is the
auditory perceptual method. This
involves a professional hearing and
analyzing the motor speech changes
associated with neurological disorders
processes for clinical assessment,
judgments, and decisions regarding
the functional change. There is a need
for a fully automated assessment
system that can organize, process,
collect, and analyze speech from
individuals with concussions and
deliver meaningful insights about the
effects on speech production.
Once an audio recording has been
processed, the next step is to extract
various acoustic features that will
form the basis of the health
diagnostics tool. Speech can be
characterized by a variety of different
features and these features can be
determined for various linguistic
elements such as phonemes, vowels,
words, or even entire sentences.
Time measurements such as average
and standard deviation of the duration
of a linguistic entity, duration of
pauses, etc., can be measured. To
measures how quickly an individual
can accurately produce a series of
rapid, alternating sounds assessment,
tool like Diadochokinetic rate comes
in action. It is an assessment tool for
assessing oral motor skills.
If the individual is experiencing
speech or language problems, speech-
language pathologists may measure
DDK rate by asking to repeat certain
sounds during a timed test. The results
can help the pathologists to evaluate
the severity of speech or language
problems, diagnose the underlying
cause, and prescribe apt treatment.
Efficiency and Accuracy
The examination of the motor speech
system can provide information about
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