Assessing Movement of Articulatory Organs in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Hypokinetic dysarthria is a motor speech disorder often present during Parkinson’s disease. It affects the speech system, including articulatory abilities. There are several speech parameters describing this domain, so it is suggested to deal with their mutual comparison. This work aims to design and describe an algorithm for calculating the parameters of articulation, adapted for the Czech language, and then compare their discriminative power. The acoustic analysis of speech included in it is done via the Praat program and basic machine learning algorithms such as Expectation-Maximization, K-means and linear regression are used for the subsequent data processing. The Mann-Whitney U test, descriptive statistics and Random Forest machine learning model using cross-validation and balanced accuracy is used for evaluation. The results are scripts for automatic assessment of vowel space area, for calculating articulation parameters and for their evaluation. The outputs of the analysis of speech recording database prove that differences in articulation can indeed be observed between normal and dysarthric speech. Based on the mutual comparison of results, it is therefore proposed in the work which parameters are being appropriate for further dealing with this issue.