Acoustic discrimination of healthy swallows from upper airway movements.
Spontaneous swallowing in dysphagic individuals has been shown to occur at a lower rate compared to healthy controls, and passive swallowing detection may function as a valid screening test to identify dysphagia in at-risk populations. To automate swallow identification, acoustic source and vocal tract features were extracted from two types of swallows and eight upper airway movements from nine healthy subjects. Swallow vs non-swallow classification accuracy was 96.3 ± 1.1%. The results provide useful methods for further development of automated tools for identification of patients with swallowing impairment.
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, 216 Oyer Speech and Hearing Clinic, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA. markskow@msu.edu
Mark D
MD
Skowronski
Michael A
MA
Crary
Rahul
R
Shrivastav
D000162:Acoustics; D057205:Automation, Laboratory; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D003679:Deglutition; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006801:Humans; D007830:Larynx / Q000502:physiology*; D015588:Observer Variation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D014159:Transducers; D014827:Vocal Cords / Q000502:physiology