Advancing Electromyographic Continuous Speech Recognition: Signal Preprocessing and Modeling

Speech is the natural medium of human communication, but audible speech can be overheard by bystanders and excludes speech-disabled people. This work presents a speech recognizer based on surface electromyography, where electric potentials of the facial muscles are captured by surface electrodes, allowing speech to be processed nonacoustically. A system which was state-of-the-art at the beginning of this book is substantially improved in terms of accuracy, flexibility, and robustness

Advancing Electromyographic Continuous Speech Recognition: Signal Preprocessing and Modeling

Speech is the natural medium of human communication, but audible speech can be overheard by bystanders and excludes speech-disabled people. This work presents a speech recognizer based on surface electromyography, where electric potentials of the facial muscles are captured by surface electrodes, allowing speech to be processed nonacoustically. A system which was state-of-the-art at the beginning of this book is substantially improved in terms of accuracy, flexibility, and robustness

EMG-to-Speech: Direct Generation of Speech from Facial Electromyographic Signals

The general objective of this work is the design, implementation, improvement and evaluation of a system that uses surface electromyographic (EMG) signals and directly synthesizes an audible speech output: EMG-to-speech

Silent Speech Interfaces for Speech Restoration: A Review

This work was supported in part by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) under Grant PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The work of Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship (IJCI-2017-32926).This review summarises the status of silent speech interface (SSI) research. SSIs rely on non-acoustic biosignals generated by the human body during speech production to enable communication whenever normal verbal communication is not possible or not desirable. In this review, we focus on the first case and present latest SSI research aimed at providing new alternative and augmentative communication methods for persons with severe speech disorders. SSIs can employ a variety of biosignals to enable silent communication, such as electrophysiological recordings of neural activity, electromyographic (EMG) recordings of vocal tract movements or the direct tracking of articulator movements using imaging techniques. Depending on the disorder, some sensing techniques may be better suited than others to capture speech-related information. For instance, EMG and imaging techniques are well suited for laryngectomised patients, whose vocal tract remains almost intact but are unable to speak after the removal of the vocal folds, but fail for severely paralysed individuals. From the biosignals, SSIs decode the intended message, using automatic speech recognition or speech synthesis algorithms. Despite considerable advances in recent years, most present-day SSIs have only been validated in laboratory settings for healthy users. Thus, as discussed in this paper, a number of challenges remain to be addressed in future research before SSIs can be promoted to real-world applications. If these issues can be addressed successfully, future SSIs will improve the lives of persons with severe speech impairments by restoring their communication capabilities.Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship IJCI-2017-3292

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers