EAGER: Feasibility of Using Speech as Biomarker for Concussions

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This project studies the feasibility of using speech as a novel biomarker for concussions, based on insights obtained from prior research that have shown links between impaired brain functioning and speech. Mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) such as concussions are arguably one of the most pressing concerns in sports today, with an estimated 2-4 million cases every year in youth sports alone. The potential short- and long-term impacts on the health and well-being of individuals with brain injuries are extensive. Untreated concussions can lead to diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, an elevated incidence of Alzheimer's disease, and dementia developing at a higher rate and a younger age. It is therefore imperative to accurately detect and appropriately treat mTBI, especially among adolescents, whose brains are still developing and more prone to long-term damage. This research advances the understanding of the relationship between brain injuries and acoustic features in speech and lays the foundation for novel and accurate concussion screening tools. Initial results based on voice collections from more than 300 boxers (25 of which were concussed) have been promising and indicate that speech may have the potential to serve as a new, easy-to-capture biomarker for mTBI. Using mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets, brief speech recordings from youth athletes are being captured. With the help of speech recognition techniques, each word is isolated and acoustic features are extracted for each phoneme in each word. Features that are being analyzed include temporal characteristics of speech (e.g., speech duration per word or phoneme or articulation rate) and frequency spectrum characteristics (e.g., pitch, formant frequencies, and mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients). Using state-of-the-art statistical analysis and machine learning techniques, these features are then analyzed for their potential as marker for mild forms of brain injuries.