Smartphones Offer New Opportunities in Clinical Voice Research

Manfredi, Claudia; Lebacq, J.; Cantarella, G.; Schoentgen, J.; Orlandi, S.; Bandini, A.; Dejonckere, P. H.

doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2015.12.020

Smartphone technology provides new opportunities for recording standardized voice samples of patientsand sending the ﬁles by e-mail to the voice laboratory. This drastically improves the collection of baseline data, as used in research on efﬁciency of voice treatments. However, the basic requirement is the suitability of smartphones for recording and digitizing pathologic voices (mainly characterized by period perturbations and noise) without signiﬁcant distortion. In this experiment, two smartphones (a very inexpensive one and a high-level one) were tested and compared with direct microphone recordings in a soundproof room. The voice stimuli consisted in synthesized deviant voice samples (median of fundamental frequency: 120 and 200 Hz) with three levels of jitter and three levels of added noise.All voice samples were analyzed using PRAAT software.The results show high correlations between jitter, shimmer, and noise-to-harmonics ratio measured on the recordings via boths martphones, the microphone, and measured directly on the sound ﬁles from the synthesizer. Smartphones thus appear adequate for reliable recording and digitizing of pathologic voices.

Smartphones Offer New Opportunities in Clinical Voice Research / Manfredi, C.; Lebacq, J.; Cantarella, G.; Schoentgen, J.; Orlandi, S.; Bandini, A.; Dejonckere, P.H. - In: JOURNAL OF VOICE. - ISSN 0892-1997. - STAMPA. - 31:(2016), pp. 111.e1-111.e7. [10.1016/j.jvoice.2015.12.020]