Survey on biomarkers in human vocalizations

TL;DR

This survey reviews the current state of vocal biomarkers used in health sensing, categorizing technologies, discussing challenges, and evaluating their potential for reliable healthcare applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy and overview of vocal biomarker technologies, highlighting progress, challenges, and the criteria for their adoption in healthcare.

Findings

Some vocal biomarkers have low error levels suitable for healthcare use

Technologies face challenges due to noise and uncertainties in measurement

Certain biomarkers show promise for reliable health monitoring

Abstract

Recent years has witnessed an increase in technologies that use speech for the sensing of the health of the talker. This survey paper proposes a general taxonomy of the technologies and a broad overview of current progress and challenges. Vocal biomarkers are often secondary measures that are approximating a signal of another sensor or identifying an underlying mental, cognitive, or physiological state. Their measurement involve disturbances and uncertainties that may be considered as noise sources and the biomarkers are coarsely qualified in terms of the various sources of noise involved in their determination. While in some proposed biomarkers the error levels seem high, there are vocal biomarkers where the errors are expected to be low and thus are more likely to qualify as candidates for adoption in healthcare applications.