Vocal indicators of psychiatric treatment effects in depressives and schizophrenics

Voice and speech changes as a result of clinical treatment for 17 depressive and 15 schizophrenic patients were investigated. Speech samples taken at interviews before and after treatment were analyzed with regard to f0, spectral energy distribution, and formant frequencies of vowels occurring in identical phonetical context. Both groups of patients showed a decrease in f0 after therapy, which was interpreted as a reduction of general arousal. Differential results with regard to spectral energy distribution suggested that the voice of depressives became more relaxed after therapy, but the opposite seemed to be true for schizophrenics. Significant formant changes obtained for the first formants of two vowels were interpreted as differences in the precision of articulation before and after therapy

Una nueva propuesta de indicadores de calidad para la ingeniería clínica: Un nuevo comienzo para la salud humana: Actas de la 25a Conferencia Internacional Anual de la Sociedad de Ingeniería en Medicina y Biología del IEEE

As we know from Stiefels paper '...we want to do our work right the first time and better the next time. But we really don't know whether we have done it right, or are doing it better, unless we have a measurement system for quality.' Unfortunately, there is little agreement in the standardization of indicators used for evaluation of organizations related to medical equipment management. And those that do the first steps, always walk on thin ice. With this paper, we suggest a set of five quality indicators for the control and the evaluation of management for medical equipment maintenance. The indicators proposed allow the organization, that applies them, to easily correct and adjust their management programs, with a strive for improvement in results and quality and broadening their experiences. The selection of the indicators was executed according to those that are most used among leading health care organizations. Sometimes the indicators are labeled differently but the basic idea is the same, and therefore the results can be compared competitively and the potential of an organization can be displayed

The Role of Perceived Voice and Speech Characteristics in Vocal Emotion Communication.

Aiming at a more comprehensive assessment of nonverbal vocal emotion communication, this article presents the development and validation of a new rating instrument for the assessment of perceived voice and speech features. In two studies, using two different sets of emotion portrayals by German and French actors, ratings of perceived voice and speech characteristics (loudness, pitch, intonation, sharpness, articulation, roughness, instability, and speech rate) were obtained from non-expert (untrained) listeners. In addition, standard acoustic parameters were extracted from the voice samples. Overall, highly similar patterns of results were found in both studies. Rater agreement (reliability) reached highly satisfactory levels for most features. Multiple discriminant analysis results reveal that both perceived vocal features and acoustic parameters allow a high degree of differentiation of the actor-portrayed emotions. Positive emotions can be classified with a higher hit rate on the basis of perceived vocal features, confirming suggestions in the literature that it is difficult to find acoustic valence indicators. The results show that the suggested scales (Geneva Voice Perception Scales) can be reliably measured and make a substantial contribution to a more comprehensive assessment of the process of emotion inferences from vocal expression