Testing software tools with synthesized deviant voices for medicolegal assessment of occupational dysphonia

• Provide an objective aid to quantify levels of physical impairment in occupational dysphonia • Testing the ability of four existing software tools in distinguishing levels of added noise in synthetic signals when the amount of jitter and noise is exactly known. • Realistic synthesized voice signals close to the degree of dysphonia occurring in real patients with vocal fold nodules. • Results show that the four tools are able to correctly estimate both jitter and noise levels, thus they could be of help to clinicians in determining the level of impairment to quantify compensation in patients affected by an occupational voice disorder.