M. Sc. Finn Spitz Room D-019 Kaiserstraße 2, 24143 Kiel, Germany Phone: +49 431 880-6132  Telefax: +49 431 880-6128 E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Research: Speech Analysis and Therapy for Parkinson Patients

The Parkinson’s disease is one of the most common central nervous system disorders and in Germany alone are approximately 300000 citizens affected. Medication and therapies can be used to treat the symptoms of the motor system. But there are often speech disorders, like a monotone, mumbling voice, silent speaking and amplified breath sounds, which can only be treated by a therapy by logopedics.

To support this therapy and to be able to measure the speech quality of the patients in their daily routine, a possibility is examined, to design a speech quality estimation using a hearing aid device. The corresponding signal processing is implemented in parallel on a mobile phone to the algorithms of the hearing aid device. As result a value is computed, which can be used to distinguish, whether the speech level is high enough and the speech is understandable.

An iPhone app is developed, to implement the needed signal processing on a mobile phone. The app is designed to fulfill different test scenarios to support the speech therapy or examine the current speech quality in realtime.

To analyze the speech correctly, the system is controlled by an own voice detection and noise is reduced. Through pattern recognition different features are extracted, to be able to analyze the speech using a classifier. The classifier can consist of multiple GMMs or a neuronal net.

Related topics:

• Speech analysis
• Pattern recognition
• App development
• Realtime digital signal processing
• Neural networks

Further interests:

• Real-time digital signal processing
• Noise estimation
• Adaptive filters

Short CV

Publications

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