Swallowing Sound Recognition at Home Using GMM

Abstract

BackgroundAiming for autonomous living for the people after a stroke is the challenge these days especially for swallowing disorders or dysphagia. The most common cause of dysphagia is stroke. In France, stroke occurs every 4 minutes, which implies 13000 hospitalizations per year. Currently, continuous medical home monitoring of patients is not available. The patient must be hospitalized or visit the medical community for possible follow-up. It is in this context that E-SwallHome (Swallowing & Breathing: Modelling and e-Health at Home) project proposes to develop tools, from hospital care until the patient returns home, which are able to monitor in real time the process of swallowing. MethodThis paper presents a relevant health problem affecting patient recovering from stroke. We propose a frequency acoustical analysis for automatic detection of swallowing process and a non-invasive acoustic based method to differentiate between swallowing sounds and other sounds in normal ambient environment during food intake. ResultThe proposal algorithm for events detection gives a global rate of good detection of 87.31%. Classification of sounds of swallowing and other sounds based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), using the leave-one-out approach according to the small amount of data in our database, gives a good recognition rate of swallowing sounds of 84.57%. ConclusionThe proposal method has great potential to assist in the clinical evaluation using only swallowing sounds, which is a non-invasive technic for swallowing studies.