Cough sound as a symptom for health disorder for elderly people

摘要

Recently, elderly people who live alone are increasing in their number. In order to secure thesituation to keep their health in good condition, it is important to find out how to check thehealth disorder even without taking face to face communication. For this, our final goal is todevelop a system detecting a symptom of abnormal health of the elderly people using acousticinformation and to integrate the system with remote sensing technology through web networkfor sending the information to the health center. In this study, we chose their cough sounds asthe symptom of the health disorder. To develop a method to distinguish the cough sound fromthe other sound signals, the hybrid model utilizing the artificial neural network model and thehidden Markov model has been developed using A-weighted sound pressure levels obtainedfrom frequency band analysis as input variables. This model had high performance for thediscrimination of the cough sound to the others with its accuracy above about 94%.