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A Tongue-Tracking Artificial Larynx

by Rachel Kremen | Submitted Thursday Dec 03, 2009 [02:50 PM]


Patients could get their voice back using a device that analyzes contact between the tongue and palate.

Researchers in South Africa are working on a new kind of artificial larynx that won't have the raspy voice of existing devices. The system tracks contact between the tongue and palate to determine which word is being mouthed, and uses a speech synthesizer to generate sounds.

According to the National Cancer Institute, some 10,000 Americans are diagnosed with laryngeal cancer each year, and most patients with advanced cancer must have their voice box removed.

"All of the currently available devices produce such bad sound--it either sounds robotic or has a gruff speaking voice," says Megan Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. "We felt the tech was there for an artificial synthesized voice solution."

The system uses a palatometer: a device that looks much like an orthodontic plate and is normally used for speech therapy. The device, made by CompleteSpeech of Orem, UT, tracks contact between the tongue and palate using 118 embedded touch sensors. The software for the artificial larynx was written by Russell and colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand. Their work is being presented at the International Conference on Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Engineering this week in Singapore.

To use the device, a person puts the palatometer in her mouth and mouths words normally. The system tries to translate those mouth movements into words before reproducing them on a small sound synthesizer, perhaps tucked into a shirt pocket.

So far, Russell has trained the system to recognize 50 common English words by saying each word multiple times with the palatometer in her mouth. The information can be represented on a binary space-time graph and put into a database. Each time the user speaks, the contact patterns are compared against the database to identify the correct word.

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Tags:speech+synthesis  artificial+speech  organ+replacement  larynx 

(http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24051/)

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