Analysis of Speech Under Stress and Cognitive Load in USAR Operations

Abstract

This paper presents ongoing work on analysis of speech under stress and cognitive load in speech recordings of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) training operations. During the training operations several team members communicate with other members on the field and members on the control command using only one radio channel. The type of stress encountered in the USAR domain, more specifically on the human team communication, includes both physical or psychological stress and cognitive task load. Physical stress due to the real situation and cognitive task load due to tele-operation of robots and equipment. We were able to annotate and identify the acoustic correlates of these two types of stress on the recordings. Traditional prosody features and acoustic features extracted at sub-band level probed to be robust to discriminate among the different types of stress and neutral data.