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Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone

OBJECTIVE: There is a critical need to develop rapid, inexpensive and easily accessible screening tools for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We report on the efficacy of collecting speech via the telephone to subsequently develop sensitive metrics that may be used as pot...

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Autores principales: Diaz-Asper, Catherine, Chandler, Chelsea, Turner, R Scott, Reynolds, Brigid, Elvevåg, Brita
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056560/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33953936
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20552076211002103
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author Diaz-Asper, Catherine
Chandler, Chelsea
Turner, R Scott
Reynolds, Brigid
Elvevåg, Brita
author_facet Diaz-Asper, Catherine
Chandler, Chelsea
Turner, R Scott
Reynolds, Brigid
Elvevåg, Brita
author_sort Diaz-Asper, Catherine
collection PubMed
description OBJECTIVE: There is a critical need to develop rapid, inexpensive and easily accessible screening tools for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We report on the efficacy of collecting speech via the telephone to subsequently develop sensitive metrics that may be used as potential biomarkers by leveraging natural language processing methods. METHODS: Ninety-one older individuals who were cognitively unimpaired or diagnosed with MCI or AD participated from home in an audio-recorded telephone interview, which included a standard cognitive screening tool, and the collection of speech samples. In this paper we address six questions of interest: (1) Will elderly people agree to participate in a recorded telephone interview? (2) Will they complete it? (3) Will they judge it an acceptable approach? (4) Will the speech that is collected over the telephone be of a good quality? (5) Will the speech be intelligible to human raters? (6) Will transcriptions produced by automated speech recognition accurately reflect the speech produced? RESULTS: Participants readily agreed to participate in the telephone interview, completed it in its entirety, and rated the approach as acceptable. Good quality speech was produced for further analyses to be applied, and almost all recorded words were intelligible for human transcription. Not surprisingly, human transcription outperformed off the shelf automated speech recognition software, but further investigation into automated speech recognition shows promise for its usability in future work. CONCLUSION: Our findings demonstrate that collecting speech samples from elderly individuals via the telephone is well tolerated, practical, and inexpensive, and produces good quality data for uses such as natural language processing.
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spelling pubmed-80565602021-05-04 Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone Diaz-Asper, Catherine Chandler, Chelsea Turner, R Scott Reynolds, Brigid Elvevåg, Brita Digit Health Original Article OBJECTIVE: There is a critical need to develop rapid, inexpensive and easily accessible screening tools for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We report on the efficacy of collecting speech via the telephone to subsequently develop sensitive metrics that may be used as potential biomarkers by leveraging natural language processing methods. METHODS: Ninety-one older individuals who were cognitively unimpaired or diagnosed with MCI or AD participated from home in an audio-recorded telephone interview, which included a standard cognitive screening tool, and the collection of speech samples. In this paper we address six questions of interest: (1) Will elderly people agree to participate in a recorded telephone interview? (2) Will they complete it? (3) Will they judge it an acceptable approach? (4) Will the speech that is collected over the telephone be of a good quality? (5) Will the speech be intelligible to human raters? (6) Will transcriptions produced by automated speech recognition accurately reflect the speech produced? RESULTS: Participants readily agreed to participate in the telephone interview, completed it in its entirety, and rated the approach as acceptable. Good quality speech was produced for further analyses to be applied, and almost all recorded words were intelligible for human transcription. Not surprisingly, human transcription outperformed off the shelf automated speech recognition software, but further investigation into automated speech recognition shows promise for its usability in future work. CONCLUSION: Our findings demonstrate that collecting speech samples from elderly individuals via the telephone is well tolerated, practical, and inexpensive, and produces good quality data for uses such as natural language processing. SAGE Publications 2021-04-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8056560/ /pubmed/33953936 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20552076211002103 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Creative Commons NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work as published without adaptation or alteration, without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Article
Diaz-Asper, Catherine
Chandler, Chelsea
Turner, R Scott
Reynolds, Brigid
Elvevåg, Brita
Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone
title Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone
title_full Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone
title_fullStr Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone
title_full_unstemmed Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone
title_short Acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone
title_sort acceptability of collecting speech samples from the elderly via the telephone
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056560/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33953936
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20552076211002103
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