VoMo Voice Monitoring App For Smartphones

Abstract

By Rachel Roberts, Speech Language Hearing Sciences; Julie Panstares, Speech Language Hearing Sciences; Kelly Carraro

Advisor: Victoria McKenna

Presentation ID: 88

Abstract: People with chronic voice problems (dysphonia) require frequent medical visits to monitor therapeutic progress. At home health monitoring has become possible through smartphone technology, but there are few applications (apps) that help to monitor voice disorders. Therefore, the overarching purpose of this study is to develop an app to help monitor chronic voice disorders. The goal of the present study was to understand how holding a phone in different positions impacted the accuracy of voice acoustic measures. Patients with healthy (n=7) and disordered (n=17) voices were recruited from the University of Cincinnati outpatient Voice Center. Recordings were made with the patient's smartphone at different distances, including holding the phone i) to the ear, ii) directly in front of the mouth (8.5 cm away), iii) as if talking on "speaker phone", and iv) as if reading from the phone. Concurrent recordings were made with a headset microphone and handheld recorder, as a clinical recording comparison. Acoustic measures were compared between the four phone positions, the handheld/phone recordings, and different speech tasks said. Analysis showed that both pitch and duration were not impacted by the type of recording device (handheld, phone). However, there was a statistically significant interaction between apparatus (phone, handheld) and task when considering its effect on harmonic-to-noise ratio, in which the phone recordings had lower values. Next steps of this study are to investigate more acoustic measures and apply our findings to the design of the VoMo app.