Comparison of Cough, Wheeze and Sustained Phonations for Automatic Classification Between Healthy Subjects and Asthmatic Patients

In this work, we consider the task of automatic classification of asthmatic patients and healthy subjects using voice stimuli. Cough and wheeze have been used as voice stimuli for this classification task in the past. In this work, we focus on sustained phonations, namely /A:/, /i:/, /u:/, /eI/, /oU/ and compare their classification performances with the cough and wheeze. Classification experiments using 35 asthmatic patients and 36 healthy subjects show that sustained vowel /i:/ achieves the highest classification accuracy of 80.79% among five vowels considered. However, it is found to be higher and lower than the classification accuracies of 78.72% and 90.25% obtained using cough and wheeze respectively. This suggests that for speech-based asthma classification, /i:/ would be a better choice compared to other vowels considered in this work. However, when non-speech sounds are included for classification, wheeze is a better choice than sustained /i:/.