Assessing effects of vibroacoustic stimulation compared to a guided mindfulness meditation using the biosignal of human speech.

Abstract

Introduction: High stress and low wellbeing pose severe individual, societal and economic threats, and there is a pressing demand for non-invasive stress reduction tools. This exploratory pilot study assessed the efficacy of speech prosody as a biosignal for stress elicitation, when comparing relaxation outcomes of two interventions with a control group.

Method: Thirty participants were divided into three treatment groups; (1) guided mindfulness meditation (2) vibroacoustic intervention (3) control. All participants read aloud a text before and after one 20-min treatment. The sixty readings were assessed using a multi-parametric acoustic-prosodic analysis, and within-speaker differences were compared between the initial and final reading.

Results: Results show groups (1) and (2) spoke with a breathier vocal quality in the second reading, while group (3) speech was tenser and at a lower, less variable loudness.

Discussion: Results demonstrate speech prosody is a sensitive biomarker for treatment-effect classification and evaluation. Practical limitations and future research perspectives are discussed.