How machine learning can help with voice disorders

There's no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. Unfortunately, many behaviorally-based voice disorders are not well understood. In particular, patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) often experience deteriorating voice quality and vocal fatigue ("tired voice") in the absence of any clear vocal cord damage or other medical problems, which makes the condition both hard to diagnose and hard to treat. But a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) believes that better understanding of conditions like MTD is possible through machine learning. Using accelerometer data collected from a wearable device developed by researchers at the MGH Voice Center, researchers demonstrated that they can detect differences between subjects with MTD and matched controls.