Assistive Technology for Heart Monitoring of Elderly People through Speech Analysis

Abstract

Most of the elderly population suffer from some sort of heart disorders, so, continuous monitoring of heart functioning is required to diagnose diseases proactively. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a tool widely used for identification of various heart diseases, but, it requires patients to visit clinic for checkup by experts. As formant frequencies of speech reflect physiological features of the human body, a correlation exists between ECG cycle and Acoustical Cardiogram (ACG) cycle obtained from formant frequency analysis of speech signal. Various heart parameters like RR-cycle duration, heart beat rate, systole cycle etc. can be determined from acoustical RR-cycle. This chapter introduces a novel non-invasive technique for monitoring of human heart functioning through speech analysis by which patients can monitor their heart functioning themselves. Such kind of assistive technology can be useful for elderly population for monitoring of various physical organs of human body as well through their speech signal analysis.