Latent Phrase Matching for Dysarthric Speech

Many consumer speech recognition systems are not tuned for people with speech disabilities, resulting in poor recognition and user experience, especially for severe speech differences. Recent studies have emphasized interest in personalized speech models from people with atypical speech patterns. We propose a query-by-example-based personalized phrase recognition system that is trained using small amounts of speech, is language agnostic, does not assume a traditional pronunciation lexicon, and generalizes well across speech difference severities. On an internal dataset collected from 32 people with dysarthria, this approach works regardless of severity and shows a 60% improvement in recall relative to a commercial speech recognition system. On the public EasyCall dataset of dysarthric speech, our approach improves accuracy by 30.5%. Performance degrades as the number of phrases increases, but consistently outperforms ASR systems when trained with 50 unique phrases

Development and Validation of a Perceived Legitimacy of Hazing Behavior Scale for College Coaches

Hazing in sport has recently received national attention from the media as well as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (Van Raalte, Cornelius, Linder, & Brewer, 2007), as hazing behaviors are prevalent within the sport community (Alfred University, 1999; Allan & Madden, 2008). While the attitudes and beliefs of student-athletes towards hazing behaviors have been examined (Campo, Poulos, & Sipple, 2005), coaches\u27 perceptions of the phenomenon have been yet to be examined. As no scale currently exists to measure coaches\u27 perceived legitimacy of hazing behaviors (PLHB) in sport, the study focused on the creation and validation of such an instrument for Division I, II, and III intercollegiate coaches. The PLHB scale underwent content validation through expert review and criterion and discriminant validation through the inclusion of a demographic questionnaire, the Defining Issues Test -2 (Rest, Narvaez, Thoma, & Bebeau, 1999), the Social Desirability Scale - Short Form (Strahan & Gerbasi, 1972)

The Feasibility of Using Video Journaling to Collect Ecological Momentary Assessment Data: Application to Health Behavior Change Interventions

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the feasibility of an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) technique in a health behavior change intervention offered within university general health courses. A six-week health behavior change project was used with two groups: video journaling and traditional (pencil and paper) group. Research methodology employed was a quantitative, quasi-experimental, control and experimental group post test comparison design. Stage of change data and program satisfaction surveys were collected from participants at a midsized southeastern university (n = 72; 36 video and 36 traditional). Participants were selected through non-probability, purposive sampling. Upon completion of the behavior change intervention 88.9 % (N = 32) of video journaling participants reported being in either the action or maintenance stage of change compared to 63.9 % (N = 23) of the traditional group. Significant difference was found between the video journaling and traditional groups in levels of satisfaction with the program (M = 3.96, SE = 0.79; M = 3.53, SE = .53 respectively; t = −2.74, p \u3c 0.05). EMA techniques using video journaling to aid behavior change interventions among late adolescence showed promise with further research needed to focus on long-term effects of such interventions

Comparison of Obesity, Overweight, and Nutritional Patterns of Southeastern College Students to National Norms

On the national level, obesity is one of the most pervasive public health problems in the United States (Menifield, Doty, Fletcher, 2008; Stern et al., 1995). More specifically, obesity is becoming a major concern for the traditional college student population. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between BMI classification and self-reported nutritional patterns of college students and determine if the BMI of these students is significantly different from nationally reported data. While particular nutritional patterns were significantly related to BMI classification, the sample also determines higher BMI than those in the national data

Weight Management Goals and Practices at a Southeastern University

This presentation was given during the American College of Sports Medicine Annual Meeting and World Congress on Exercise is Medicine

Application of a Course-Long Health Behavioral Change Project

This article was published in Journal of Health Education Teaching Techniques

Relationship Between Technology Use and Health Behaviors Among Late Adolescents

This presentation was given during the American College of Sport Medicine Annual Meeting

Promoting Physical Activity to Perinatal Women Within the Clinical Setting: a Pilot Study

This presentation was given during the International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health Annual Conference