Speech pathological study of epinosic patient using artificial neural network

The use of phonetics in the field of medical study was first reported in 1911 by H. Gutman. Since than things have changed a great deal. Nowadays widely developed computerized equipments are available in phonetics. In the speech utterances of healthy as well as epinosic patients the vowels and voiced consonants may be distinguished easily for pathological studies. In the present study, phonetic information such as vowel amplitude, formant frequency and time duration were extracted from the utterances of healthy and epinosic (mentally and physically disturbed) patients and used as input to a neural network. It was found that an epinosic patient could be easily detected by using the ANN method. It is hoped that proposed ANN method can also be used effectively by speech therapists, as a tool for mass health care for emotionally disturbed as well as epileptic cases.