The need for a harmonized speech dataset for Alzheimer’s disease biomarker development

Abstract

This commentary is the product of a concerted effort to understand the needs, barriers, and gaps in the field of speech and language biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). It distills interviews, surveys, and extensive correspondence with global leaders in the areas of dementia research, clinical trials, linguistics, and data analytics into an idealized clinical-study design for the harmonized collection of voice recordings. The ultimate goal of the effort is to democratize the ongoing speech and language analytics efforts by making such rich datasets available to the wider research ecosystem.

Keywords

• voice data collection
• speech and language biomarkers
• acoustic and linguistic features
• cohort characterization
• open-access database
• alzheimer’s disease
• neurodegenerative disease