Estimating Speech Duration by Measuring the Abdominal Movement Using a Barometric Sensor

Measuring the amount of speech production in daily life is important for understanding communication in organizations and identifying mental disorders. However, measuring the amount of speech production can be problematic in terms of privacy. We observed the whole body condition during speech and noted that the abdomen strains during speech production.Therefore, we developed a less uncomfortable, inflatable abdominal motion measurement device using a barometric sensor to measure speech production indirectly. We measured speech production in 10 subjects and created a speech discrimination model using machine learning. However, the estimated speech duration in an actual meeting using this model was much longer than the actual duration. We found that the wearer's posture significantly affects the accuracy of the speech discrimination model developed in this study. We plan to improve the abdominal motion measurement device to minimize the effect of posture and achieve more accurate speech production measurement.