A Voice-Producing System With Naturalness and Variable Multi-Frequency Vocalization for Patients Who Have Undergone Laryngectomy

Abstract

Patients with advanced laryngeal cancer usually mist undergo total laryngectomy, which causes communication difficulties. Several voice-producing devices have been developed to assist such patients in restoring their ability to speak. However, these devices produce monotonous sounds and require hand-held operation. A novel electronic voice-producing system was thus proposed to assist patients with laryngectomy in improving their speech performance. By imitating normal human speech, the proposed system enables the adjustment of the fundamental frequency of generated sound according to changes in lung pressure through exhalation; this enables different tones to be produced. Moreover, the proposed system is wearable and thus convenient to use. According to the experimental results, the proposed system provides changes in fundamental frequency corresponding to different tones and sentences in human speech, and outperforms existing devices in speech performance. A novel voice-producing system was proposed and implemented to assist patients who had undergone laryngectomy to resume basic communication activities.

Keywords

• Laryngeal cancer
• total laryngectomy
• communication ability
• voice-producing devices
• wearable design