Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Improve Voice Disorder Identification Through the Use of a Reliable Mobile App

The evolution of the Internet of Things, cloud computing and wireless communication has contributed to an advance in the interconnectivity, efficiency and data accessibility in smart cities, improving environmental sustainability, quality of life and well-being, knowledge and intellectual capital. In this scenario, the satisfaction of security and privacy requirements to preserve data integrity, confidentiality and authentication is of fundamental importance. In particular, this is essential in the healthcare sector, where health-related data are considered sensitive information able to reveal confidential details about the subject. In this regard, to limit the possibility of security attacks or privacy violations, we present a reliable mobile voice disorder detection system capable of distinguishing between healthy and pathological voices by using a machine learning algorithm. This latter is totally embedded in the mobile application, so it is able to classify the voice without the necessity of transmitting user data to or storing user data on any server. A Boosted Trees algorithm was used as the classifier, opportunely trained and validated on a dataset composed of 2003 voices. The most frequently considered acoustic parameters constituted the inputs of the classifier, estimated and analyzed in real time by the mobile application.