Development of Hands-free Speech Enhancement System for Both EL-users and Esophageal Speech Users

A hands-free speech enhancement system for laryngectomies is proposed to improve the usability and the speech quality. The system has a small and right weight transducer, photo-reflector based lip movement level sensors, and a microphone. The sensor outputs are used for generating the transducer turn on/off signal. A simple performance test was conducted if the system can determine the utterance segments accurately, and the result showed good utterance detection performance. Also, we tested with five more subjects and confirmed that the proposed method was well performed even under the speaker-independent condition.