Measuring Correlation between Mental Fatigues and Speech Features

Abstract

This paper deals with how mental fatigue has an effect on human voice. For this a monotonous task to increase the feeling of the fatigue and a set of subjective questionnaire for rating the fatigue were designed. From the experiments the designed task was proven to be monotonous based on the results of the questionnaire responses. To investigate a statistical relationship between speech features extracted from the collected speech data and fatigue, the T test for two-related-samples was used. Statistical analysis shows that speech parameters deeply related to the fatigue are the first formant bandwidth, Jitter, H1-H2, cepstral peak prominence, and harmonics-to-noise ratio. According to the experimental results, it can be seen that voice is changed to be breathy as mental fatigue proceeds.