Estimating Speech Duration by Measuring the Abdominal Movement Using a Barometric Sensor

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel, privacy-preserving method for estimating speech duration by measuring abdominal movement with a barometric sensor, using machine learning to analyze speech-related motion.

Contribution

The paper presents a new inflatable abdominal sensor and a speech discrimination model that indirectly estimates speech duration, addressing privacy concerns and posture effects.

Findings

The model overestimates speech duration in real meetings.

Posture significantly impacts measurement accuracy.

Future improvements aim to reduce posture influence.

Abstract

Measuring the amount of speech production in daily life is important for understanding communication in organizations and identifying mental disorders. However, measuring the amount of speech production can be problematic in terms of privacy. We observed the whole body condition during speech and noted that the abdomen strains during speech production.Therefore, we developed a less uncomfortable, inflatable abdominal motion measurement device using a barometric sensor to measure speech production indirectly. We measured speech production in 10 subjects and created a speech discrimination model using machine learning. However, the estimated speech duration in an actual meeting using this model was much longer than the actual duration. We found that the wearer's posture significantly affects the accuracy of the speech discrimination model developed in this study. We plan to improve the abdominal motion measurement device to minimize the effect of posture and achieve more accurate speech production measurement.