title: Smartphones Offer New Opportunities in Clinical Voice Research.
abstract: Smartphone technology provides new opportunities for recording standardized voice samples of patients and sending the files by e-mail to the voice laboratory. This drastically improves the collection of baseline data, as used in research on efficiency of voice treatments. However, the basic requirement is the suitability of smartphones for recording and digitizing pathologic voices (mainly characterized by period perturbations and noise) without significant distortion. In this experiment, two smartphones (a very inexpensive one and a high-level one) were tested and compared with direct microphone recordings in a soundproof room. The voice stimuli consisted in synthesized deviant voice samples (median of fundamental frequency: 120 and 200 Hz) with three levels of jitter and three levels of added noise. All voice samples were analyzed using PRAAT software. The results show high correlations between jitter, shimmer, and noise-to-harmonics ratio measured on the recordings via both smartphones, the microphone, and measured directly on the sound files from the synthesizer. Smartphones thus appear adequate for reliable recording and digitizing of pathologic voices.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Manfredi
authors.affiliation: Neurosciences Institute, University of Louvain, B-1200 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lebacq
authors.affiliation: Otolaryngology Department, Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cantarella
authors.affiliation: Department of Signals, Images and Acoustics, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schoentgen
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Orlandi
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bandini
authors.affiliation: Neurosciences, University of Leuven & Federal Institute for Occupational Diseases, Brussels, Belgium.. Electronic address: philippe.dejonckere@med.kuleuven.be.
authors.forename: P H
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: DeJonckere
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000295:instrumentation*; D006801:Humans; D008422:Materials Testing; D063731:Mobile Applications; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D000068997:Smartphone; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013066:Speech-Language Pathology / Q000295:instrumentation*; D014832:Voice Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000628:therapy; D014833:Voice Quality
keywords: baseline design; dysphonia; smartphone; synthetic voices; voice assessment