Automatic Detection of Parkinson’s Disease from Speech Using Acoustic, Prosodic and Phonetic Features

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease ranked second after Alzheimer’s disease. It affects the central nervous system and causes a progressive and irreversible loss of neurons in the dopaminergic system, that insidiously leads to cognitive, emotional and language disorders. But until day there is no specific medication for this disease, the drug treatments that exist are purely symptomatic, that’s what encourages researchers to consider non-drug techniques. Among these techniques, speech processing becomes a relevant and innovative field of investigation and the use of machine-learning algorithms that provide promising results in the distinction between PD and healthy people. Otherwise many other factors such as feature extraction, number of feature, type of features and the classifiers used they all influence on the prediction accuracy evaluation. The aim of this study is to show the importance of this last factor, a model is suggested which include feature extraction from 3 types of features (acoustic, prosodic and phonetic) and classification is achieved using several machine learning classifiers and the results show that the proposed model can be highly recommended for classifying PD in healthy individuals with an accuracy of 99.50% obtained by Support Vector Machine (SVM).