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. 2019 May:2019:6391-6394.
doi: 10.1109/icassp.2019.8682691. Epub 2019 Apr 17.

SPEECH MARKERS FOR CLINICAL ASSESSMENT OF COCAINE USERS

Carla Agurto  1 , Raquel Norel  1 , Mary Pietrowicz  1 , Muhammad Parvaz  2 , Sivan Kinreich  3 , Keren Bachi  2 , Guillermo Cecchi  1 , Rita Z Goldstein  2
Affiliations

SPEECH MARKERS FOR CLINICAL ASSESSMENT OF COCAINE USERS

Carla Agurto et al. Proc IEEE Int Conf Acoust Speech Signal Process. 2019 May.

Abstract

One of the main foci of addiction research is the delineation of markers that track the propensity of relapse. Speech analysis can provide an unbiased assessment that can be deployed outside the lab, enabling objective measurements and relapse susceptibility tracking. This work is the first attempt to study unscripted speech markers in cocaine users. We analyzed 23 subjects performing two tasks: describing the positive consequences (PC) of abstinence and the negative consequences (NC) of using cocaine. We perform two main experiments: first, we analyzed whether acoustic and semantic features can infer clinical variables such as the Cocaine Selective Severity Assessment; then, we analyzed the main problem of interest: to see if these features are powerful enough to infer if the subjects remains abstinent. Our results show that speech features have potential to be used as a proxy to monitor cocaine users under treatment to recover from their addiction.

Keywords: abstinence; acoustic; cocaine; drug addiction; semantic.

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Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Best performance results for identifying abstinence using the two speech tasks.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Partial correlations of semantic similarity obtained for speech task: NC.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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