# Automatic Quality Control and Enhancement for Voice-Based Remote Parkinson's Disease Detection

## TL;DR

This paper develops automatic quality control methods for voice recordings to improve remote Parkinson's disease detection accuracy under various acoustic degradations like noise and reverberation.

## Contribution

It introduces automatic quality assessment techniques to identify degradations and select suitable enhancement algorithms, enhancing PD detection in diverse acoustic conditions.

## Key findings

- Quality control improves detection accuracy
- Effective enhancement algorithm selection based on degradation type
- Demonstrated robustness in real-world noisy environments

## Abstract

The performance of voice-based Parkinson's disease (PD) detection systems degrades when there is an acoustic mismatch between training and operating conditions caused mainly by degradation in test signals. In this paper, we address this mismatch by considering three types of degradation commonly encountered in remote voice analysis, namely background noise, reverberation and nonlinear distortion, and investigate how these degradations influence the performance of a PD detection system. Given that the specific degradation is known, we explore the effectiveness of a variety of enhancement algorithms in compensating this mismatch and improving the PD detection accuracy. Then, we propose two approaches to automatically control the quality of recordings by identifying the presence and type of short-term and long-term degradations and protocol violations in voice signals. Finally, we experiment with using the proposed quality control methods to inform the choice of enhancement algorithm. Experimental results using the voice recordings of the mPower mobile PD data set under different degradation conditions show the effectiveness of the quality control approaches in selecting an appropriate enhancement method and, consequently, in improving the PD detection accuracy. This study is a step towards the development of a remote PD detection system capable of operating in unseen acoustic environments.