Integrating User-Centred Design in the Development of a Silent Speech Interface Based on Permanent Magnetic Articulography

Abstract

A new wearable silent speech interface (SSI) based on Permanent Magnetic Articulography (PMA) was developed with the involvement of end users in the design process. Hence, desirable features such as appearance, portability, ease of use and light weight were integrated into the prototype. The aim of this paper is to address the challenges faced and the design considerations addressed during the development. Evaluation on both hardware and speech recognition performances are presented here. The new prototype shows a comparable performance with its predecessor in terms of speech recognition accuracy (i.e. ~95% of word accuracy and ~75% of sequence accuracy), but significantly improved appearance, portability and hardware features in terms of miniaturization and cost.