Fatigue Assessment through Voice Analysis

"This project will produce a speech-based fatigue assessment system. Speech-based systems can have very limited intrusivity, making them useful for a wide variety of military, commercial, and even private-vehicle applications. Indeed, some systems can befully passive, permitting fatigue assessment in the course of other communications, even in opponents. This project will select certain reliably automated, acoustic measures of vocal control, laryngeal dynamics, and speech articulation to produce anestimator that correlates highly with fatigue measures. The emphasis will be on measures that have high potential for rapid and robust assessment, with minimal human judgments except for high-level control of the system. Phase I will focus onfeasibility, establishing a set of measures that, for a modest collection of native English speakers, demonstrate the required correlation with fatigue. The system architecture will also be a deliverable for Phase I. Phase II will produce an operationalprototype. It will additionally address other, potentially confounding influences, such as hypoxia and antihistamine use, to differentiate these from fatigue. Phase II will also investigate the importance of task variety and native languages other thanEnglish. Many activities in both civilian and military operations can benefit from afatigue-assessment product that is passive or minimally invasive. Such assessmentsbased on speech can provide crit