Design of Wearable Electrolarynx with Automatic Control

Abstract

Objective: The current work aims to design and develop an automatically controlled wearable electrolarynx, a voice substitution device for laryngeal carcinoma survivals. Methods: The physical activity of mouth opening is sensed, amplified, and made to act as an enable signal to trigger the wearable electrolarynx. The resulting speech is recorded and compared for its voice reaction durations with that of manual electrolarynx and normal speaking methods. Perception evaluations of 5 subjects from 10 speech-language therapists are obtained. Results: The wearable electrolarynx turn-on in 13 ?s once the mouth movement for speech is sensed. The voice initiation time and termination durations are 215.68 m and 231.41 ms, respectively. Results indicate that there is no significant difference (P < 0.05) between the voice reaction durations of wearable electrolarynx and normal speaking methods. The subjective evaluation results show that there is a significant improvement (P < 0.05) in intelligibility and noise reduction when compared to a commercially available electrolarynx with an average intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.68 from analysis of variance two factors without replication. Conclusions: The assessment of the wearable and automatically controlled electrolarynx provides hands-free speech and easy control over the device.