Development of a Speech Diagnostic and Rehabilitation System-A Game System for Voice Disorder Rehabilitation

For traditional rehabilitation of speech disorder, speech therapists need to assess and treat patients with voice disorder individually. This individual therapy process leads to a long waiting for patients to have next rehabilitation. In addition, patients have to spend a lot of time practicing, and this practice would bore them and make the efficacy of treatment poor. Therefore, the development of advanced system to assist the speech diagnosis and rehabilitation assessment is getting more important. In addition, there is a need to develop a rehabilitation program for voice disorder patients to achieve their goal of recovery. The overall purpose of this study is to develop a tool to assist speech therapy and rehabilitation which focused on building simple interface to let the assessment be done without the need of particular knowledge of speech processing while at the same time also provided further deep analysis of the speech which can be useful for the speech therapist. Practically, the tool we have developed so far provides automatic scoring based on the comparison of the patient’s speech signal with another normal person’s speech signal on several aspects including pitch, vowel classification, voiced-unvoiced detection, fricative detection and sound intensity comparison toprovide a quantitative analysis. Then, the overall score was computed from the average score of all featuresscoring. The main purpose of this new study is to design a computer game system for voice disorder rehabilitation. By playing game, we motivated the patients for speech rehabilitation. For the first year study, we will focus on developing our game system could record a short speech signal and calculated its volume (in decibel, dB) and fundamental frequency (in Hertz, Hz) immediately. These two parameters were used to control the animated character and provide visual feedback for patients when they practiced. With appropriate level setting, speech therapists would not only diagnosis the condition of treatment but also formulate rehabilitation schedule for the patients from their game performance. Based on each rehabilitation schedule, the patients might practice with the game system on the computer or notebook in their free time to achieve better efficacy of rehabilitation. For the second year study, 20 adult patients (10 males and 10 females) with voice disorder (one day per week and six times per day with a total time of 30 minutes for six months, each experiment includes 4 pitch and 2 volume games) will be tested with our developed game systems to evaluate the performance and the practicality of the system. The results of this test will be used as preliminary validity test of the system. Hopefully, our study could provide a tool with the advantages of simple and professional mode to indicate the difference on several aspects of speech between normal speaker and patient with speech disorders to assist the speech diagnostic and rehabilitation.