Abstract
Despite emergent progress in many fields of bionics, a functional Bionic Voice prosthesis for laryngectomy patients (larynx amputees) has not yet been achieved, leading to a lifetime of vocal disability for these patients. This study introduces a novel framework of Pneumatic Bionic Voice Prostheses as an electronic adaptation of the Pneumatic Artificial Larynx (PAL) device. The PAL is a non-invasive mechanical voice source, driven exclusively by respiration with an exceptionally high voice quality, comparable to the existing gold standard of Tracheoesophageal (TE) voice prosthesis. Following PAL design closely as the reference, Pneumatic Bionic Voice Prostheses seem to have a strong potential to substitute the existing gold standard by generating a similar voice quality while remaining non-invasive and non-surgical. This paper designs the first Pneumatic Bionic Voice prosthesis and evaluates its onset and offset control against the PAL device through pre-clinical trials on one laryngectomy patient. The evaluation on a database of more than five hours of continuous/isolated speech recordings shows a close match between the onset/offset control of the Pneumatic Bionic Voice and the PAL with an accuracy of 98.45 ±0.54%. When implemented in real-time, the Pneumatic Bionic Voice prosthesis controller has an average onset/offset delay of 10 milliseconds compared to the PAL. Hence it addresses a major disadvantage of previous electronic voice prostheses, including myoelectric Bionic Voice, in meeting the short time-frames of controlling the onset/offset of the voice in continuous speech.
Highlights
The Bionic Voice source is an electronic prosthesis which substitutes for the voice generation function of the missing vocal folds of a laryngectomy patient [1]
The Pneumatic Artificial Larynx (PAL) can be considered as a simple model of the human larynx with a fixed pair of vocal folds driven exclusively by the variations of the intraoral and subglottal pressure values and without any neural/neuro-muscular input from the missing larynx
The quality of PAL speech is comparable to the existing gold standard of TE voice prostheses and far better than the Electrolarynx [6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
Summary
The Bionic Voice source is an electronic prosthesis which substitutes for the voice generation function of the missing vocal folds of a laryngectomy patient [1]. The theory of human speech generation is based on a source-filter model in which a source, (generally a combination of aspiration noise and glottal pulse train generated by vocal folds), is filtered through a resonance model of the vocal tract. Laryngectomy patients lose the ability to generate and control this voice source signal, while retaining a functional vocal tract filter. A pneumatic Bionic Voice prosthesis—Controlling the voice onset and offset. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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