SMOQP

SMOQP: Objective Measurement System of Speech Quality

Project objectives

This project deals with a Human Computer Interaction system applied to the application fields of Health and Healthcare and Life Sciences.
Objective: involves the creation of an innovative product/service, an application for the objective measurement of a patient's phonological and articulatory pathologies. To date, this solution is not present on the global market.

The aim is to create an objective metric system for measuring the pronunciation of a word and its phonemes, thus allowing the creation of two distinct systems: the first for the professional (doctor: e.g. speech therapist) with the aim of evaluating the articulatory abilities of the patient, and the second for the patient/user, to improve his/her pronunciation. The patient will have immediate numerical feedback on the correctness of the pronunciation, feedback that can also be provided through sound feedback (e.g. speech synthesis) to allow even blind/visually impaired patients to use the system in full autonomy.
The measurement underlying the functioning of the system in question will be rather complex, going well beyond the mere confidence measurement that vocal engines perform today. This measurement must then be made net of some fundamental factors whose effects must be studied in depth and managed so that the result is actually the one sought, for example:

• Ambient noise
• Spectrum variability with respect to the distance from the microphone
• ideality hypothesis of the acoustic model of the vocal engine, i.e. degree of isomorphism between the spectrum of a word contained in the engine with respect to its actually correct pronunciation
• hypothesis of linearity of the motor response with respect to an 'ideal linearity' of pronunciation decay
• variability of pronunciation acoustic spectra with respect to sex and age
• variability of local and dialectal expressions.

The service/product thus constructed (at prototype level) will allow, for example, the doctor-therapist to create articulatory programs/exercises to be carried out in various sessions over time, both in the presence of the speech therapist himself, and in autonomy and relaxation on the part of the patient.

Start and end date

Project Manager

Prof. Manuele Casale (UR of Integrated Therapies in Otolaryngology), Scientific Director

Coordinating institution of the project

Other Institutions involved

• Mediavoice Srl
• Cloudwise

Funding source(s).

Arts 4.0

Link to the project website

https://smoqp.mediavoice.it/