Automatic Detection of Parkinson’s Disease Using Noise Measures of Speech

Abstract—Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the mid brain. It is demonstrated that about 90 % of the people with PD also develop speech impairments, exhibiting symptoms such as monotonic speech, low pitch intensity, inappropriate pauses, imprecision in consonants and problems in prosody; although they are already identify problems, only 3 % to 4 % of the patients receive speech therapy. The research community has addressed the problem of the automatic detection of PD by means of noise measures; however, in such works only the phonation of the English vowel /a / has been considered. In this paper, the five Spanish vowels uttered by 50 people with PD and 50 healthy controls (HC) are evaluated automatically considering a set of four noise measures: Harmonics to Nois