Abstract
Human voice contains rich information. Few longitudinal studies have been conducted to investigate the potential of voice to monitor cognitive health. The objective of this study is to identify voice biomarkers that are predictive of future dementia. Participants were recruited from the Framingham Heart Study. The vocal responses to neuropsychological tests were recorded, which were then diarized to identify participant voice segments. Acoustic features were extracted with the OpenSMILE toolkit (v2.1). The association of each acoustic feature with incident dementia was assessed by Cox proportional hazards models. Our study included 6, 528 voice recordings from 4, 849 participants (mean age 63 ± 15 years old, 54.6% women). The majority of participants (71.2%) had one voice recording, 23.9% had two voice recordings, and the remaining participants (4.9%) had three or more voice recordings. Although all asymptomatic at the time of examination, participants who developed dementia tended to have shorter segments than those who were dementia free (P < 0.001). Additionally, 14 acoustic features were significantly associated with dementia after adjusting for multiple testing (P < 0.05/48 = 1 × 10-3). The most significant acoustic feature was jitterDDP_sma_de (P = 7.9 × 10-7), which represents the differential frame-to-frame Jitter. A voice based linear classifier was also built that was capable of predicting incident dementia with area under curve of 0.812. Multiple acoustic and linguistic features are identified that are associated with incident dementia among asymptomatic participants, which could be used to build better prediction models for passive cognitive health monitoring.
Highlights
Spoken language is the spontaneous and intuitive way of communication that characterizes one’s intellect and personality [1]
14 acoustic features were significantly associated with dementia after adjusting for multiple testing (P < 0.05 / 48 = 1 × 10-3)
A voice based linear classifier was built that was capable of predicting incident dementia with area under curve of 0.812
Summary
Spoken language is the spontaneous and intuitive way of communication that characterizes one’s intellect and personality [1]. Impairments in the semantic verbal fluency and lexico-semantic processing emerge early during the course of the disease, often years before symptoms of cognitive deterioration [10, 11]. Anatomical neuroimaging studies indicate that semantic fluency and naming performance are highly correlated with neurodegeneration in the temporal and parietal lobes [15, 16]. These changes reflect both, the neurodegeneration in language specific cortical regions, as well as a loss of top-down coordination resulting from impairments in other cognitive domains such as attention and memory
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
