A speech corpus for chronic kidney disease

TL;DR

This paper introduces a specialized speech corpus of 289 CKD patients aimed at advancing research in pathological voice analysis, illness detection, and severity assessment, highlighting voice differences linked to disease severity.

Contribution

The study presents a new speech corpus for CKD patients, detailing data collection methods and initial voice analysis findings related to disease severity.

Findings

Differences in voice quality between CKD patients and controls

Altered phoneme pronunciation and prosody in CKD patients

Variations in glottal source and aerodynamic parameters

Abstract

In this study, we present a speech corpus of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) that will be used for research on pathological voice analysis, automatic illness identification, and severity prediction. This paper introduces the steps involved in creating this corpus, including the choice of speech-related parameters and speech lists as well as the recording technique. The speakers in this corpus, 289 CKD patients with varying degrees of severity who were categorized based on estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), delivered sustained vowels, sentence, and paragraph stimuli. This study compared and analyzed the voice characteristics of CKD patients with those of the control group; the results revealed differences in voice quality, phoneme-level pronunciation, prosody, glottal source, and aerodynamic parameters.