Construction of a Elderly Japanese Speech Corpus and Early Detection of Dementia

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K12022
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Review Section: Basic Section 61010:Perceptual information processing-related
• Research Institution: Aichi Prefectural University
• Principal Investigator: IRIBE Yurie 愛知県立大学, 情報科学部, 准教授 (40397500)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 北岡 教英 豊橋技術科学大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 教授 (10333501)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 認知症傾向検出 / 高齢者音声 / 対話データベース

Outline of Final Research Achievements

As Japanese society continues to age, the number of people with dementia will continue to increase. Although a cure for dementia has not yet been discovered, it is said that early detection can delay the progress of the disease and identify those who may at some point need assistance, therefore early detection of dementia is important. Several studies have been conducted on the use of dialogue speech as a diagnostic test for dementia, but only one has used the acoustic and linguistic information included in speech as diagnostic material. To develop and test our method, we have constructed a new corpus of elderly Japanese dialogue speech using the recorded speech of elderly people living in different areas of Japan. We also want to improve the accuracy of early detection of dementia by taking into account differences in the regional dialects of elderly people from different areas. As a result, the dementia detection accuracy was about 90.9% using the new corpus.

Free Research Field

音声情報処理

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究では日常生活の中から収集可能な対話音声に着目した．近年は高齢者施設にロボットが導入されるなど，高齢者の対話音声を収集できる機会が増加している．対話音声に含まれる音響情報と言語情報は認知症の症状に表れる特徴を多く含んでおり，認知症の判別に有用であると考えられる．
認知症の早期診断を目的とした研究は，認知症識別モデルの作成のみに着眼点を置いているものが多く，認知症の症状が音声情報および言語情報にどのように表出されるのかについては明らかとなっていない．さらに，被験者も比較的若い年代を対象としており，今後加速する高齢化社会に対応するため，本研究のように高い年代の被験者を分析することに意義がある．