Objective: To discover the unique voiceprint changed in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Background: Parkinson’s disease, PD, is a serious neurodegenerative disease affected millions old people all over the word. In general, the locomotion deficit, which serious affected the daily life of patients with PD occurred usually at the later period. Moreover, the tone change is gradually getting serious, however, the public lack of the awareness.

Method: Here, we recruited 83 PD patients and 44 age-/sex balanced controls to performed the vowel test. The customized Matlab and PRAAT code was used to extract the unique voiceprint of each sound clips. Furtherly, regression analysis was used to classify the subjects.

Results: The data revealed that male PD patients presented lower formant frequencies for “a”, “o”, and “e” vowels than control subjects; however, female PD patients presented higher formant frequencies for “a”, “o”, and “e” vowels than control subjects. These results indicate that the intensity of muscle contractions with the vocal cords increases, which is also correlated to a large degree with the severity of disease. Moreover, the correlation results disclosed that the vowel phonation slightly positive correlated with the severity of PD.

Conclusion: Generally, the patients with PD present significant changed in formant frequency, this signifying the severity of PD is slightly positive correlate with phonation activity.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/the-unique-voiceprint-changed-in-parkinsons-disease/