Towards semi-automated assistance for the treatment of stress disorders

Frans Van Der Sluis*, Egon L. Van Der Broek, Ton Dijkstra

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

People who suffer from a stress disorder have a severe handicap in daily life. In addition, stress disorders are complex and consequently, hard to define and hard to treat. Semi-automatic assistance was envisioned that helps in the treatment of a stress disorder. Speech was considered to provide an excellent tool for providing an objective, unobtrusive emotion measure. Speech from 25 patients suffering from a stress disorder was recorded while they participated in two storytelling sessions. The Subjective Unit of Distress (SUD) was determined as a subjective measure and enabled the validation of the derived speech features. A regression model with four speech parameters (i.e., signal, power, zero crossing ratio, and pitch), was able to explain 70% of the variance in the SUD measure. As such it lays the foundation for semi-automated assistance for the treatment of patients with stress disorders.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHEALTHINF 2010 - 3rd International Conference on Health Informatics, Proceedings
Number of pages4
Publication date2010
Pages446-449
ISBN (Print)9789896740160
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Event3rd International Conference on Health Informatics, HEALTHINF 2010 - Valencia, Spain
Duration: 20 Jan 201023 Jan 2010

Conference

Conference3rd International Conference on Health Informatics, HEALTHINF 2010
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period20/01/201023/01/2010
SeriesHEALTHINF 2010 - 3rd International Conference on Health Informatics, Proceedings

Keywords

  • Diagnosis
  • Indicator
  • Speech
  • Stress

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