Measuring Health: A Guide to Rating Scales and Questionnaires

In this review article, we focus on the various types of materials used in biomedical implantable devices, including the polymeric materials used as substrates and for the packaging of such devices. Polymeric materials are used because of the ease of fabrication, flexibility, and their biocompatible nature as well as their wide range of mechanical, electrical, chemical, and thermal behaviors when combined with different materials as composites. Biocompatible and biostable polymers are extensively used to package implanted devices, with the main criteria that include gas permeability and water permeability of the packaging polymer to protect the electronic circuit of the device from moisture and ions inside the human body. Polymeric materials must also have considerable tensile strength and should be able to contain the device over the envisioned lifetime of the implant. For substrates, structural properties and, at times, electrical properties would be of greater concern. Section 1 gives an introduction o...

Polymeric Biomaterials for Medical Implants and Devices

https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:111231/ATTACHMENT01

ESPEN guideline clinical nutrition in neurology

Motor Speech Disorders: Advances in Assessment and Treatment

The authors have limited consideration of motor speech disorders to dysarthrias of neurogenic nature. Aphasias (defined by the authors as problems of processing and symbolic formulation of the language code) are excluded. So are the deviant patterns of speech, such as developmental disorders of articulation and those disorders arising from structural impairments, such as cleft palate. A short but useful review of the basic motor process of speech production and its evaluation by clinical and other techniques is included. A more detailed description of relatively unfamiliar methods, such as palatography and videofluoroscopy would have been desirable. The neurologist will find the chapters on principles of neurologic function and hierarchy of motor organization rather basic. Other specialists may find these useful. On the other hand, many speech pathologists may find the section on motor speech examination somewhat devoid of detail. A disproportionately large space is allotted to the examination of the

Motor Speech Disorders

This study collected data on the maximum anterior and posterior tongue strength and endurance in 420 healthy Belgians across the adult life span to explore the influence of age, sex, bulb position, visual feedback, and order of testing. Measures were obtained using the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument (IOPI). Older participants (more than 70 years old) demonstrated significantly lower strength than younger persons at the anterior and the posterior tongue. Endurance remains stable throughout the major part of life. Gender influence remains significant but minor throughout life, with males showing higher pressures and longer endurance. The anterior part of the tongue has both higher strength and longer endurance than the posterior part. Mean maximum tongue pressures in this European population seem to be lower than American values and are closer to Asian results. The normative data can be used for objective assessment of tongue weakness and subsequent therapy planning of dysphagic patients.

The Influence of Age, Sex, Bulb Position, Visual Feedback, and the Order of Testing on Maximum Anterior and Posterior Tongue Strength and Endurance in Healthy Belgian Adults

It is commonly acknowledged that word or phoneme intelligibility is an important criterion in the assessment of the communication efficiency of a pathological speaker. People have therefore put a lot of effort in the design of perceptual intelligibility rating tests. These tests usually have the drawback that they employ unnatural speech material (e.g., nonsense words) and that they cannot fully exclude errors due to listener bias. Therefore, there is a growing interest in the application of objective automatic speech recognition technology to automate the intelligibility assessment. Current research is headed towards the design of automated methods which can be shown to produce ratings that correspond well with those emerging from a well-designed and well-performed perceptual test. In this paper, a novel methodology that is built on previous work (Middag et al., 2008) is presented. It utilizes phonological features, automatic speech alignment based on acoustic models that were trained on normal speech, context-dependent speaker feature extraction, and intelligibility prediction based on a small model that can be trained on pathological speech samples. The experimental evaluation of the new system reveals that the root mean squared error of the discrepancies between perceived and computed intelligibilities can be as low as 8 on a scale of 0 to 100.

/pdf/automated-intelligibility-assessment-of-pathological-speech-4svsi67f0v.pdf

Automated intelligibility assessment of pathological speech using phonological features

The reported study investigated the effect of 7 rate control methods (RCM) on running speech intelligibility, speaking rate (SR), articulation rate (AR) and pause characteristics in 27 individuals with dysarthria. The data reveal that with the exception of slower on demand, each RCM resulted in lower mean SRs and ARs (p < 0.05). Clinically significant improvements in intelligibility were found in half of the participants with different types of dysarthria. The majority of them had normal or decreased ARs and SRs. The most effective methods were: alphabet board, hand tapping and pacing board. For the majority of speakers, the maximal decrease in speech rate was not associated with the maximal increase in intelligibility.

/pdf/effect-of-rate-control-on-speech-production-and-2vwba8c8gi.pdf

Effect of rate control on speech production and intelligibility in dysarthria.

Background: Currently, clinicians mainly rely on perceptual judgements to assess intelligibility of dysarthric speech. Although often highly reliable, this procedure is subjective with a lot of intrinsic variables. Therefore, certain benefits can be expected from a speech technology‐based intelligibility assessment. Previous attempts to develop an automated intelligibility assessment mainly relied on automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that were trained to recognize the speech of persons without known impairments. In this paper automatic speech alignment (ASA) systems are used instead. In addition, previous attempts only made use of phonemic features (PMF). However, since articulation is an important contributing factor to intelligibility of dysarthric speech and since phonological features (PLF) are shared by multiple phonemes, phonological features may be more appropriate to characterize and identify dysarthric phonemes.Aims: To investigate the reliability of objective phoneme intelligibility sco...

Speech Technology-Based Assessment of Phoneme Intelligibility in Dysarthria.

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of rate control methods (RCMs) on speaking rate (SR), articulation rate (AR), and intelligibility in dysarthric speakers. Method

/pdf/the-effect-of-rate-control-on-speech-rate-and-1vds8gojfm.pdf

Gwen Van Nuffelen

Papers

The Influence of Age, Sex, Bulb Position, Visual Feedback, and the Order of Testing on Maximum Anterior and Posterior Tongue Strength and Endurance in Healthy Belgian Adults

Automated intelligibility assessment of pathological speech using phonological features

Effect of rate control on speech production and intelligibility in dysarthria.

Speech Technology-Based Assessment of Phoneme Intelligibility in Dysarthria.

The effect of rate control on speech rate and intelligibility of dysarthric speech.