Construction of Speech Support System Using Body-Conducted Speech Recognition for Disorders

The number of disorders associated with cancer of the pharynx has recently increased, and many require surgical removal of the pharynx. Although successful recovery has been reported after surgery, most cases develop speech disabilities. A common solution used to deal with such communication disorders is esophagus vocalization. However, esophagus speech sounds are not a clear type of speech as they do not provide a sufficient volume of speech or frequency for use in daily life. Here, we report the development of a speech support system using body-conducted speech recognition for cases with such a disability. The system uses two features: body-conducted speech recognition and a sub-word unit transfer function database. The system retrieves speech from body-conducted speech. We used a healthy subject to demonstrate the feasibility of making body-conducted speech clear using the sub-word unit transfer function.