Speech impairment is a life-altering disorder that prevents patients from communicating with their environment. In 2012, around 10% of the adult US population reported suffering from one (source).
Speech disorders impact a person’s employment, self-esteem and quality of life, and can come hand in hand with other conditions such as ALS, strokes and Parkinson’s disease (source). These conditions usually require assistance from other people and the disrupted communication comes in the way of patients getting their needs met.
The aim of this project is to develop an NLP model that performs speech to speech translation from impaired speech to understandable sound speech.
Existing research didn’t yield results that are satisfactory enough to be useful to patients and we believe that it is due to the lack of available data (current impaired speech databases are less than 25 hours of speech long). We thus also aim to develop an app to gather a database of troubled speech by having patients record sentences on their phones.