Data Augmentation Technology for Dysarthria Assistive Systems

Voice-driven communication aids are one of the methods commonly used by patients with dysarthria. However, this type of assistive devices demands a large amount of voice data from patients to increase the effectiveness. In the meantime, this will sink patients into an overwhelming recording burden. Due to those difficulties, this research proposes a voice augmentation system to conquer the aforementioned concern. Furthermore, the system can improve the recognition efficiency. The results of this research reveal that the proposed speech generator system for dysarthria can launch corpus to be more similarities to the patient's speech. Moreover, the recognition rate, in duplicate sentences, has been improved and promoted to the higher level. The word error rate can be reduced from 64.42% to 4.39% in the case of patients with Free-talk. According to these results, our proposed system can provide more reliable and helpful technique for the development of communication aids.