Straw Fighter: A Gamification-based System for Supporting Vocal Exercise by Tube Phonation

Tube phonation, or straw phonation, is a commonly used vocal exercise technique to improve the efficiency of the vocal mechanism by repeatedly producing a speech sound in a tube or a straw. Trainees need to maintain daily vocal exercise for a month to improve their voice; however, the exercise is monotonous and boring, and trainees find it hard to keep themselves motivated. This study therefore proposes the use of straw fighter, a biofeedback system for tube phonation based on a gamification framework. Straw fighter is a shooting game implemented using an IoT device with an LCD display, M5Stack Basic, taking into account cost-effectiveness and ease of development. A user can beat enemies by phonating into a straw and can improve phonation by simply enjoying the game. Possible system function enhancements include sharing an exercise log with a speech therapist using cloud storage.