Speech monitoring of infective laryngitis

Many types of parameters have been proposed for the evaluation of vocal cord abnormalities by speech waveform analysis. However, none of them taken separately allows a reliable assessment of the presence and the degree of abnormality. We propose combining three different parameters which take into account different consequences of the hoarseness. To assess the effectiveness of the parameters, a group of subjects during and after acute infective laryngitis are compared with control subjects. The jitter, the glottal to noise excitation (GNE) and the normalised error prediction (NEP) are the parameters studied. Preliminary results indicate that reliable discrimination between normal and abnormal patients may be possible using these three parameters.