Speaker Model to Monitor the Neurological State and the Dysarthria Level of Patients with Parkinson's Disease

摘要

The progression of the disease in Parkinson's patients is commonly evaluated with the unified Parkinson's disease rating scale (UPDRS), which contains several items to assess motor and non-motor impairments. The patients develop speech impairments that can be assessed with a scale to evaluate dysarthria. Continuous monitoring of the patients is suitable to update the medication or the therapy. In this study, a robust speaker model based on the GMM-UBM approach is proposed for the continuous monitoring of the state of Parkinson's patients. The model is trained with phonation, articulation, and prosody features with the aim of evaluating deficits on each speech dimension. The performance of the model is evaluated in two scenarios: the monitoring of the UPDRS score and the prediction of the dysarthria level of the speakers. The results indicate that the speaker models are suitable to track the disease progression, specially in terms of the evaluation of the dysarthia level of the speakers.