Swallowing Sound Recognition at Home Using GMM

International audienceBackgroundAiming 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