Development of a (silent) speech recognition system for patients following laryngectomy

Abstract

Surgical voice restoration post-laryngectomy has a number of limitations and drawbacks. The present gold standard involves the use of a tracheo-oesophageal fistula (TOF) valve to divert air from the lungs into the throat, which vibrates, and from this, speech can be formed. Not all patients can use these valves and those who do are susceptible to complications associated with valve failure. Thus there is still a place for other voice restoration options. With advances in electronic miniaturization and portable computing power a computing-intensive solution has been investigated. Magnets were placed on the lips, teeth and tongue of a volunteer causing a change in the surrounding magnetic field when the individual mouthed words. These changes were detected by 6 dual axis magnetic sensors, which were incorporated into a pair of special glasses. The resulting signals were compared to training data recorded previously by means of a dynamic time warping algorithm using dynamic programming. When compared to a small vocabulary database, the patterns were found to be recognised with an accuracy of 97% for words and 94% for phonemes. On this basis we plan to develop a speech system for patients who have lost laryngeal function.

Towards an Intraoral-Based Silent Speech Restoration System for Post-laryngectomy Voice Replacement

“…lips and tongue) during speech articulation by using an array of magnetic sensors located around the mouth [1,3]. Although PMA shares some similarities with Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) [5,17], it does not explicitly provide the Cartesian position/ orientation of the markers, but rather a summation of the magnetic fields from magnets that are associated with a particular articulatory gesture.…”

“…surgical removal of larynx as part of treatment for cancer or other diseases affected the vocal cords) lose their voices and often struggle with their daily communication. Hence, they may experience severe impact on their lives which can lead to social isolation, loss of identity and depression [1,2]. However, there are currently only a limited number of post-laryngectomy voice restoration methods available for these individuals: esophageal speech, the electrolarynx and speech valves.…”

“…However, there are currently only a limited number of post-laryngectomy voice restoration methods available for these individuals: esophageal speech, the electrolarynx and speech valves. Unfortunately, these methods are often limited by their usability and/or the abnormal voice produced, which may be hard to understand for listeners [1,[3][4]. On the other hand, typing-based augmented and alternative communication (AAC) devices are limited by slow manual text input [5].…”

Voice Restoration After Laryngectomy Based on Magnetic Sensing of Articulator Movement and Statistical Articulation-to-Speech Conversion

“…This often has a severe impact on people's lives and can lead to social isolation, feelings of loss of identity and, sometimes, clinical depression [3,2,7]. To make things worse, existing methods for voice restoration are far from ideal [13,18]. The 'gold-standard', the tracheooesoephageal valve, requires frequent replacement every 3-4 months due to biofilm growth and, for this reason, is an expensive treatment [22,12,11].…”

Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

“…Fortunately, more affordable and portable electromagnetic devices are being developed as are small handheld or wearable devices (Fagan et al, 2008). Researchers are also testing the efficacy of permanently implantable and wireless sensors (Chen et al, 2012;Park et al, 2012).…”