The recordings of the patient’s voice are then evaluated by algorithms that measure acoustic properties, including the acoustic correlates of perceived pitch and loudness of the voice. The patient repeats sustained vowel sounds, like “aaa” or “ooo,” or reads a short passage that reflects a wide variety of sounds and mouth movements in the English language. During that process, a patient goes into the clinic and sits in a soundproof booth outfitted for speech recordings.
Weerathunge and Stepp teamed up with other BU researchers to put five different HIPAA-compliant teleconferencing platforms to the test: Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams,, VSee Messenger, and Zoom.Īs the pandemic unfolded and lockdowns moved much voice and speech therapy online, “there was no consensus among clinicians trying to convert to telepractice therapy, and we wanted to determine the accuracy of the acoustic measures they can get through telepractice,” Weerathunge says.Īlthough voice therapists had sometimes conducted telepractice sessions with patients before the pandemic, evaluations of the effectiveness of treatment were always carried out in person. “Although the COVID-19 crisis appears to be waning, telepractice popularity is here to stay,” Stepp says. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering and a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering, does research in the lab of Cara Stepp, a College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College associate professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences. Weerathunge, a graduate student fellow at BU’s Rafik B. But many teleconferencing platforms distort sounds in their efforts to eliminate background noise.īoston University graduate researcher Hasini Weerathunge wanted to find out if popular teleconferencing platforms used for telemedicine could capture sounds accurately enough for clinicians to successfully treat and evaluate patients with voice and speech disorders. In a virtual world, voice therapy presents a unique challenge because clinicians must rely on acoustic recordings of voice to evaluate the effectiveness of their treatments. But when it comes to telemedicine, not all medical care is easily translated to a remote format.
view moreĪs a result of the coronavirus pandemic, people across the world have experienced how teleconferencing platforms like Zoom help folks stay connected-playing games with friends, hosting virtual weddings, and even visiting a doctor. But until now, the accuracy of those evaluation procedures done online has never been examined. Image: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, voice and speech therapists halted in-person treatment evaluations, moving them to a virtual format.