• Dementia and Neurocognitive Disorders
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2024

Background and Purpose: Voice, reflecting cerebral functions, holds potential for analyzing and understanding brain function, especially in the context of cognitive impairment (CI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study used voice data to distinguish between normal cognition and CI or Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD). Methods: This study enrolled 3 groups of subjects: 1) 52 subjects with subjective cognitive decline; 2) 110 subjects with mild CI; and 3) 59 subjects with ADD. Voice features were extracted using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and Chroma. Results: A deep neural network (DNN) model showed promising performance, with an accuracy of roughly 81% in 10 trials in predicting ADD, which increased to an average value of about 82.0%±1.6% when evaluated against unseen test dataset. Conclusions: Although results did not demonstrate the level of accuracy necessary for a definitive clinical tool, they provided a compelling proof-of-concept for the potential use of voice data in cognitive status assessment. DNN algorithms using voice offer a promising approach to early detection of AD. They could improve the accuracy and accessibility of diagnosis, ultimately leading to better outcomes for patients.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.179-184
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• 2011

Recently, the fast development of communication technologies has brought a great convince for human beings' life. Lots of commercial services and transactions can be done by using mobile communication equipments such as smart phones. Consequently, smart phones have attracted lots of companies to invest them for their potential growth of market. Compared with basic feature phone, a smart phone can offer more advanced computing ability and connectivity. However, based on the responses of customers, there still are many defectives such as not friendly and smooth operation, short standby time of batteries, threat of virus infected and so on needed to be improved. Therefore, this study will propose a product innovative function development procedure into TRIZ (theory of inventive problem solving) to transform voice of customers into product design and to create novel functions, respectively. A case study of smart phones will be provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.49-58
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• 1999

A new channel access function is proposed to enhance the performance of the Joint CDMA/PRMA. It is obtained in consideration of the number of terminals in reservation mode and the number of terminals in contention mode whose probability distribution is estimated by applying pseudo Bayesian approach. Simulation results show that the performance of the Joint CDMA/PRMA can be improved by applying new channel access function under voice-only traffic and mixed voice/random-data traffic.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.95-102
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• 2008

Multiple physical changes of the larynx and its components occur with age. Vocal pitch, commonly expressed through measures of fundamental frequency (Fo) relate to physical conditions of the larynx. Available data is lacking for the senescent voice, and should be applied to the of changes of elderly speakers' Fo characteristics. The purpose of this study was to investigate the Fo of normal elderly speaker's voice. A total of 406 normal elderly speakers (207 males and 199 females) participated in this experiment. Age ranged from 60 years to 89 years. The subjects were asked to produce sustained corner vowels (/a/ /i/ /u/) three times each and the data were analyzed using the MDVP of CSL. According to the results of this study, the mean Fo from the ages of 60's to 80's shows 143.95Hz(SD 13.94) for men and 185.42Hz (SD 15.29) for women. For men, a significant change is found as a function of age in the Fo (F=16.181, p<.05). A post-hoc Scheffe test revealed significant differences between the Fo data of subjects aged 60's and 70's, 60's and 80's. For women, a significant change is found as a function of age in the Fo (F=49.013, p<.05). A post-hoc $Scheff'{e}$ test revealed significant differences between the Fo data of subjects in their 60's and 70's, 70's and 80's, 60's and 80's. The Fo of men goes up from their 60's to 80's gradually, whereas the Fo of women goes down gradually until their 70's, and after their 70's it again increases. It has been known that diminishing estrogen levels in women in old age may be a factor in lowering Fo, whereas diminishing testosterone levels in men may contribute to a rising Fo. This result may be used as some meaningful guideline and lead the basic data to differentiate between normal aged voice and aged voice disorders.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.13-15
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• 2014

Presbyphonia is defined as voice change caused by aging. Since presbyphonia is one of the natural aging processes, the treatment should be considered for the patients complaining communication difficulties. The treatment should not only target on presbylaryngis, but also on underlying systemic conditions such as lung function, neurological diseases and medications. Therefore, the treatment for the patients with presbyphonia should be multidisciplinary including underlying disease control, voice therapy and surgical treatment. Although various experiments on treatment of presbylaryngis are currently being tried, repeated injection laryngoplasty is still playing an important role because presbyphonia is destined to get worse over time.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2016

The purpose of this work is to examine the voice onset times(VOTs) of the voiceless and voiced stops from the ten young male speakers of the Buckeye corpus[9]. The factors that are known to affect VOTs were also extracted, including the place of articulation, height of following vowels, location within word, presence of a preceding [s], status of the target word with respect to the content versus function word, presence of a syllabic stress, word frequency and speech rate. Findings from this work mostly agreed with those from earlier studies on English, but with some exceptions and new discoveries. We hope that this work can contribute to figuring out the nature and properties of the spontaneous speech of English.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.59 no.2
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• pp.445-451
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• 2010

This paper presents a threshold adaptation based voice query transcription scheme for music information retrieval. The proposed scheme analyzes monophonic voice signal and generates its transcription for diverse music retrieval applications. For accurate transcription, we propose several advanced features including (i) Energetic Feature eXtractor (EFX) for onset, peak, and transient area detection; (ii) Modified Windowed Average Energy (MWAE) for defining multiple small but coherent windows with local threshold values as offset detector; and finally (iii) Circular Average Magnitude Difference Function (CAMDF) for accurate acquisition of fundamental frequency (F0) of each frame. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme, we implemented a prototype music transcription system called AMT2 (Automatic Music Transcriber version 2) and carried out various experiments. In the experiment, we used QBSH corpus [1], adapted in MIREX 2006 contest data set. Experimental result shows that our proposed scheme can improve the transcription performance.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.37A no.9
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• pp.792-798
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• 2012

Network Quotient, an important figure in modern society, the intelligibility of speech as a conversation partner to maximize pulling up feeling of liking it as much as possible has become an important issue. The humidity of air in the intelligibility of speech have many influences. Therefore, in this paper, we carried out experiment to apply voice signal analysis techniques which to analyze influenced vocal cords in 30%, 50% and 80%, maintaining a constant humidity of the environment. With this in mind, we carried out experiments on intensity and pitch of voice signal on twenty male 20s in maintaining a constant humidity 30%, 50% and 80% of humidity. Finally, we carried out study to draw a significance through statistical analysis measuring characteristic parameter of vocal cord function to change of humidity.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.37 no.5A
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• pp.388-394
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• 2012

In this paper, the influence analysis of food on human body organs is proposed by applying speech signal processing techniques. Until these days, most of researches regarding the influence of food on body organs are such that "A" ingredient of food may produce a good effect on "B" organ. However, the numerical and quantified researches regarding these effects hardly have been performed. This paper therefore proposes a method to quantify the effects by using numerical data, so as to retrieve new facts and informations. Especially, this paper investigates the effect of tomatoes on human heart function. The experiment collects samples of voice signals, before and after 5 minutes, 30 minutes and 1 hour, from 15 males in their 20s who have not abnormal heart function; the voice signal components are applied to measure changes of heart conditions to digitize and quantify the effects of tomatoes on cardiac function.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.133-140
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• 2002

The purpose of this study was to investigate any changes in acoustic qualities of voice as ,a function of nasalance, in order to determine the relationship between vocal quality and nasalance. Twenty normal subjects (10 males and 10 females) vocalized /a/, /$\tilde{a}$/, and /a $\eta$/. The changes in nasalance and acoustic characteristics of the voice were analyzed by Nasometer (Model 6200-3, Kay Elemetrics, co) and Dr, Speech 4.0 (Tiger Electronics, Co), respectively. One-way ANOVA was used to examine any changes in jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio, and normalized noise energy relative to the nasalance in 3 types of vocalization. The Person r correlation coefficient was used to identify the relationship between the nasalance and the vocal quality. There was no statistically significant changes in jitter, shimmer, HNR and NNE. The jitter, however, tended to increase as the nasalance socre increased, compared to the other vocal parameters. In addition, the NNE showed an increase on / $\tilde{a}$/, and /a $\eta$/, more on the /a $\eta$/. Thus, it was speculated that NNE could be used to identify or screen resonant disorders with hypernasality