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Speech enhancement during BiPAP use for persons living with ALS

University of British Columbia

Speech from behind a face mask while on Bilevel Positive Air Pressure (BiPAP) ventilation is extremely difficult for persons living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The inability to verbally communicate while on ventilation causes frustration and feelings of isolation from loved ones and decreases quality of life. A system that integrates with face masks, captures speech, removes ventilator wind noise and outputs and recognizes de-noised speech is proposed, implemented and tested. The system is tested with a dataset consisting of digitally added noise as well as a single patient with ALS. Automated machine recognition of the words is then performed and results analyzed. A subjective listening test is conducted with individuals listening to the noisy and filtered speech samples and the results are also analyzed. Although intelligibility does not seem to improve for human listeners, there appears to be some improvement in machine recognition scores. In addition, feedback from the ALS community reports an improvement in the quality of life simply because patients are able to use their own voice and be heard by loved ones.

Text

2012-11-26

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43611

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/