scholarly journals The Potentials of Computer Analyzing the Acoustic Characteristics of a Human Speech under Spaceflight Conditions.

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-124
Author(s):  
S.A. Lebedeva ◽  
D.M. Shved ◽  
V.I. Gushin

The paper presents current approaches to the assessment of the psycho-physiological status of a human operator by analyzing his/her speaking and gives a historical review of an application of speech acoustic analysis in the field of military aviation and manned spaceflight as well as under conditions of on-ground model experiments. Various methods of mathematical analysis of a speech signal when determining the human emotional and functional status and techniques of noise suppression in audio recordings are also considered. The applicability of the said methods for non-invasive psycho-physiological monitoring of cosmonauts under spaceflight conditions was assessed.

2014 ◽  
Vol 490-491 ◽  
pp. 274-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gülçin Baysal ◽  
Fatma Neşe Kök ◽  
Levent Trabzon ◽  
Huseyin Kizil ◽  
İkilem Gocek ◽  
...  

Monitoring body fluids such as sweat composition can provide useful information about the physiological status. Physiological monitoring of body fluids such as sweat with a textile-based system has the advantage of being non-invasive and easily accessible and such monitoring is beneficial to indicate information about body's physiological status. In the present study, it is aimed to design a textile-based system with non-invasive methods which can be used to monitor a sportsman's performance. A novel, disposable and wearable biochemical analytical device was designed and fabricated by patterning micro channels and reservoirs using SU-8 photoresist through photolithography technique on an absorbant bicomponent Evolon® nonwoven substrate. It was obtained that hydrophilic reservoirs were well defined and demarcated by hydrophobic barriers. Therefore, no liquid leakage was observed around the reservoirs which was crucial for achieving a proper enzyme immobilization and the successful detection of the color change after the simulated sweat was deposited on the hydrophilic reservoir areas. Analyte optimization studies revealed that color change became more evident with the increasing analyte concentration until 20 mM and started to decrease with further increase due to analyte inhibition. Also, on textile fabrics, color densities started to decrease after 40 mM analyte concentration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Allan Orr

AbstractCarillons are a diverse and global form of musical and civic heritage: musical instruments comprised of a series of 23 or more bells, typically hung in a tower-like structure, tuned chromatically and played from a touch-sensitive manual and pedal console using an elaborate mechanical action. Carillon bells have a distinct series of musical overtones which should be accurately tuned to one another and with other bells they sound alongside. Although these overtones have been previously studied ex situ, this study assesses the acoustic characteristics of two early-twentieth century carillons in Toronto, Canada as a combination of structure, bells, and mechanical action. Thus, the instrument and its context are considered holistically, more accurately reflecting the musical sensitivity of a carillonist. Spectral analysis of audio samples of each bell at different musical dynamic levels enabled the analysis of the acoustic qualities of the bells and the mechanical action of the instruments. The tuning of bells in the instruments varied; most importantly, there was a significant difference between the audial intensity of the bell tones produced by the instruments, demonstrating the importance of the mechanical action as part of the ‘carillon system’. This was represented with a resistive power-law model, that represents the sensitivity of intensity to carillonist musical dynamic level. A discussion of the implications for artistic and heritage practice follows. Understanding the in situ physical acoustics of the carillon as a holistic instrument in its context informs performers, arrangers, and composers of how they can best embrace the instrument’s unique qualities to improve artistic pursuits and support the appreciation of carillons as heritage instruments and function as civic voices.


Author(s):  
Ricardo R. Santos ◽  
Fabiana V. Alves ◽  
Patrik O. Bressan ◽  
Ricardo E. Aguiar ◽  
Wellington O. Santos ◽  
...  

In this work, we present a non-invasive electronic platform for physiological data acquisition on cattle grazing systems. The platform can be used for dairy and beef cattle to continuously monitor physiological variables such as skin temperature, heartbeats, and respiratory frequency. The set of sensors are coupled into a halter so that they are in touch with the animal's forehead. Users can monitor the data acquired by the electronic device using a mobile device (smartphone or tablet) and it visualizes important physiological parameters in the platform cloud system.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Norel ◽  
Mary Pietrowicz ◽  
Carla Agurto ◽  
Shay Rishoni ◽  
Guillermo Cecchi

ABSTRACTALS is a fatal neurodegenerative disease with no cure. Experts typically measure disease progression via the ALSFRS-R score, which includes measurements of various abilities known to decline. We propose instead the use of speech analysis as a proxy for ALS progression. This technique enables 1) frequent non-invasive, inexpensive, longitudinal analysis, 2) analysis of data recorded in the wild, and 3) creation of an extensive ALS databank for future analysis. Patients and trained medical professionals need not be co-located, enabling more frequent monitoring of more patients from the convenience of their own homes. The goals of this study are the identification of acoustic speech features in naturalistic contexts which characterize disease progression and development of machine models which can recognize the presence and severity of the disease. We evaluated subjects from the Prize4Life Israel dataset, using a variety of frequency, spectral, and voice quality features. The dataset was generated using the ALS Mobile Analyzer, a cell-phone app that collects data regarding disease progress using a self-reported ALSFRS-R questionnaire and several active tasks that measure speech and motor skills. Classification via leave-five-subjects-out cross-validation resulted in an accuracy rate of 79% (61% chance) for males and 83% (52% chance) for females.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (10) ◽  
pp. 2487-2501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thea Knowles ◽  
Meghan Clayards ◽  
Morgan Sonderegger

Purpose Heterogeneous child speech was force-aligned to investigate whether (a) manipulating specific parameters could improve alignment accuracy and (b) forced alignment could be used to replicate published results on acoustic characteristics of /s/ production by children. Method In Part 1, child speech from 2 corpora was force-aligned with a trainable aligner (Prosodylab-Aligner) under different conditions that systematically manipulated input training data and the type of transcription used. Alignment accuracy was determined by comparing hand and automatic alignments as to how often they overlapped (%-Match) and absolute differences in duration and boundary placements. Using mixed-effects regression, accuracy was modeled as a function of alignment conditions, as well as segment and child age. In Part 2, forced alignments derived from a subset of the alignment conditions in Part 1 were used to extract spectral center of gravity of /s/ productions from young children. These findings were compared to published results that used manual alignments of the same data. Results Overall, the results of Part 1 demonstrated that using training data more similar to the data to be aligned as well as phonetic transcription led to improvements in alignment accuracy. Speech from older children was aligned more accurately than younger children. In Part 2, /s/ center of gravity extracted from force-aligned segments was found to diverge in the speech of male and female children, replicating the pattern found in previous work using manually aligned segments. This was true even for the least accurate forced alignment method. Conclusions Alignment accuracy of child speech can be improved by using more specific training and transcription. However, poor alignment accuracy was not found to impede acoustic analysis of /s/ produced by even very young children. Thus, forced alignment presents a useful tool for the analysis of child speech. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7070105


Author(s):  
Anoop B. N. ◽  
G. N. Girish ◽  
Sudeep P. V. ◽  
Jeny Rajan

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique widely used in ophthalmology. The presence of speckle affects the quality of OCT images. Despeckling is necessary to improve its visual quality, and it is an integral part of software packages used for the computerized analysis of OCT. Even though a few methods for despeckling OCT are available in the literature, a cross-comparison of their performance is not known to be available. In this chapter, the techniques available in the literature for despeckling the OCT images have been identified. The results of the despeckling algorithms are compared both qualitatively and quantitatively by concerning the noise suppression capability and feature preservation. Among the available techniques, iterative adaptive unbiased (IAUB) filter is found to be superior as far as its performance regarding despeckling on retinal OCT images.


Author(s):  
Nathalee C. de Almeida ◽  
Jannayna D. Barros ◽  
Heliana B. Soares ◽  
Adriano de A. Bresolin ◽  
Ana Maria G. Guerreiro ◽  
...  

Digital signal processing techniques have been used by acoustic analysis to evaluate the voice quality of the patient, due to the simplicity and non-invasive procedures for measurements.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Véronique Bukmaier ◽  
Jonathan Harrington

The study is concerned with the relative synchronic stability of three contrastive sibilant fricatives /sʂ ɕ/ in Polish. Tongue movement data were collected from nine first-language Polish speakers producing symmetrical real and non-word CVCV sequences in three vowel contexts. A Gaussian model was used to classify the sibilants from spectral information in the noise and from formant frequencies at vowel onset. The physiological analysis showed an almost complete separation between /sʂ ɕ/ on tongue-tip parameters. The acoustic analysis showed that the greater energy at higher frequencies distinguished /s/ in the fricative noise from the other two sibilant categories. The most salient information at vowel onset was for /ɕ/, which also had a strong palatalizing effect on the following vowel. Whereas either the noise or vowel onset was largely sufficient for the identification of /sɕ/ respectively, both sets of cues were necessary to separate /ʂ/ from /sɕ/. The greater synchronic instability of /ʂ/ may derive from its high articulatory complexity coupled with its comparatively low acoustic salience. The data also suggest that the relatively late stage of /ʂ/ acquisition by children may come about because of the weak acoustic information in the vowel for its distinction from /s/.


1984 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Robbins ◽  
Hilda B. Fisher ◽  
Eric C. Blom ◽  
Mark I. Singer

Acoustic characteristics of two types of alaryngeal speech were quantified and compared to normal speech production. High-quality audio recordings were obtained from 15 subjects who had undergone the tracheoesophageal puncture method of postlaryngectomy vocal rehabilitation (Singer & Blom, 1980), 15 esophageal speakers, and 15 laryngeal talkers as they sustained the vowel/a/and read a standard paragraph. Ten frequency, 7 intensity, and 13 duration variables were quantified. Central tendency and variability measures of frequency and duration for the three speaker groups indicated that tracheoesophageal speech is more similar to normal speech than is esophageal speech. Intensity measures indicated that tracheoesophageal speech is more intense than normal and esophageal speech.


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