SAMI: an M-Health application to telemonitor intelligibility and speech disorder severity in head and neck cancers.

Perceptual measures, such as intelligibility and speech disorder severity, are widely used in the clinical assessment of speech disorders in patients treated for oral or oropharyngeal cancer. Despite their widespread usage, these measures are known to be subjective and hard to reproduce. Therefore, an M-Health assessment based on an automatic prediction has been seen as a more robust and reliable alternative.

Automatic modelling of perceptual judges in the context of head and neck cancer speech intelligibility.

Background: Perceptual measures such as speech intelligibility are known to be biased, variant and subjective, to which an automatic approach has been seen as a more reliable alternative. On the other hand, automatic approaches tend to lack explainability, an aspect that can prevent the widespread usage of these technologies clinically.

Aims: In the present work, we aim to study the relationship between four perceptual parameters and speech intelligibility by automatically modelling the behaviour of six perceptual judges, in the context of head and neck cancer.

Criteria for creating new standard reading passages for the assessment of speech and voice: A Delphi consensus study.

Standard reading passages allow for the study of the integrated functions of speech and voice components in contextual, running speech, with target stimuli in a controlled environment. In both clinical practice and research, these texts provide rapid insight into the characteristics of the patient's speech, with fewer hesitations than in conversational speech and better predictability by the evaluator. Although a plethora of texts exist in different languages, they present various limitations.

Intelligibility and comprehensibility: A Delphi consensus study.

Background: Intelligibility and comprehensibility in speech disorders can be assessed both perceptually and instrumentally, but a lack of consensus exists regarding the terminology and related speech measures in both the clinical and scientific fields.

Aims: To draw up a more consensual definition of intelligibility and comprehensibility and to define which assessment methods relate to both concepts, as part of their definition.

Methods & Procedures: A three-round modified Delphi consensus study was carried out among clinicians, researchers and lecturers engaged in activities in speech disorders.

[Prosodic analysis of speech of patient affected by peripheral facial paralysis].

Introduction: The aim of study of prosody in facial palsy is to assess the intensity of pathology in suprasegmental viewpoint in order to establish a proper rehabilitation.

Methods: Patients were recorded during a reading and spontaneous speech test and a prosodic observation of speech spectrogram provided by Praat software.

Results: The Accentual Groups lowering and significant dysprosodics elements (adverse effects and breaking balance) and a larger amount of disfluencies showed that the prosody of patients with facial palsy is altered because they need to swallow their saliva intentionally.

[Acoustic analysis of the articulatory disorders of patients affected by peripheral facial paralysis].

Introduction: The study of joint disorders in facial paralysis is an important element of support to guide rehabilitation.

Material: The material used for the registration of the database is a digital recorder Zoom H4N (way format, sample rate 44,100 Hz, 16 bit quantization). The microphone used is a Shure Beta 58, super cardioid.