Screening upper respiratory diseases using acoustics parameter analysis of speaking voice

Primary disease diagnosing using various biological sound is a practice from ages, where the biological sound called bioacoustics is used for diagnosis. The recent studies have demonstrated that the abnormality due to the disease impacts the voice production system to a significant extent, researchers also studied the wide spectrum of voice pathologies.1–5 A significant deviation is observed in speaking voice due to emotions, confidence, feelings and etc.6,7 Moreover, analysis of the acoustic parameters of speaking voice can be used for understanding mental and health status.8 The focus of the paper was to compare the disease specific variations in acoustic parameter values of the speaking voice and corresponding upper respiratory diseases. Large number studies have been carried out for objective analysis of voice. But most of these studies are focused on analysing the acoustic features which are highly person specific like jitter, pitch, tone using mathematical signal processing techniques.9–11 There are various frameworks of voice signal analysis being used by researchers like for mood identification, emotion recognition, disease classification etc,12–15 however, many of frameworks that are in practice today, are based on Jitter, Shimmer, Pitch Tone which are highly user specific due to which it cannot be generalised for analysis of individuals.16