Keeping Citizens Informed About Value in Health Care

UIDB/03213/2020 UIDP/03213/2020In the context of the creation of the first Portuguese Atlas of Health Variation (PAHV), we associate a linguistic resource to the Atlas in the form of a terminological glossary. In this article, we will present the interdisciplinary contours of this project, in which the fields of Terminology, Literacy, and Health Economics meet to design a collaborative product with two components. One is geared toward experts in the field of Value-Based Health Care. The other is an approach that considers the low literacy level of citizens who are not experts in this field and therefore leads to thinking about adapting terminology content for popularization and dissemination through social networks.publishersversionpublishe

Characterization of speech from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis by neuromorphic processing

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a severe disease, which dramatically reduces the speech communication skills of patients as disease progresses. The present study is devoted to define accurate and objective estimates to characterize the loss of communication skills, to help clinicians and therapists in monitoring disease progression and in deciding on rehabilitation interventions. The methodology proposed is based on the perceptual (neuromorphic)definition of speech dinamics, concentrated in vowel sound in character and duration. We present the results from a longitudinal study carried out in an ALS patient during one year. Discussion addresses future actions

Detecting neuromotor disease from speech articulation

Speech articulation may be an important resource to study neuromotor activity in relation with neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Through the present work a biomechanical model for the joint structure of the jaw and tongue is introduced. This model allows putting into relation formant trajectories with jaw-tongue kinematics in terms of dorso-ventral and rostro-caudal movements of the structure. The reconstruction of the absolute velocity of the system from inverse filtering estimates of the first two formants allows the introduction of the velocity distribution histograms as descriptors of articulation behavior. A study case using recordings separated in time from a patient suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, compared to distributions from a normative control is presented. It may be seen that patient’s distributions show larger contents for low ranges of velocity and smaller contents for high velocity ranges compared to the control distribution. Global comparisons of velocity distribution profiles between the control and patient’s records using Information Theory measurements may be used to monitor illness conditions and progress

Detecting neuromotor disease from speech articulation

Speech articulation may be an important resource to study neuromotor activity in relation with neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Through the present work a biomechanical model for the joint structure of the jaw and tongue is introduced. This model allows putting into relation formant trajectories with jaw-tongue kinematics in terms of dorso-ventral and rostro-caudal movements of the structure. The reconstruction of the absolute velocity of the system from inverse filtering estimates of the first two formants allows the introduction of the velocity distribution histograms as descriptors of articulation behavior. A study case using recordings separated in time from a patient suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, compared to distributions from a normative control is presented. It may be seen that patient’s distributions show larger contents for low ranges of velocity and smaller contents for high velocity ranges compared to the control distribution. Global comparisons of velocity distribution profiles between the control and patient’s records using Information Theory measurements may be used to monitor illness conditions and progress