Early Detection of Severe Apnoea through Voice Analysis and Automatic Speaker Recognition Techniques

This study is part of an on-going collaborative effort between the medical and the signal processing communities to promote research on applying voice analysis and Automatic Speaker Recognition techniques (ASR) for the automatic diagnosis of patients with severe obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). Early detection of severe apnoea cases is important so that patients can receive early treatment. Effective ASR-based diagnosis could dramatically cut medical testing time. Working with a carefully designed speech database of healthy and apnoea subjects, we present and discuss the possibilities of using generative Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), generally used in ASR systems, to model distinctive apnoea voice characteristics (i.e. abnormal nasalization). Finally, we present experimental findings regarding the discriminative power of speaker recognition techniques applied to severe apnoea detection. We have achieved an 81.25 % correct classification rate, which is very promising and underpins the interest in this line of inquiry.