When voice therapists conducted sessions with patients before the pandemic, the sessions were always carried out in person. A patient sat in a soundproof booth outfitted for speech recordings to hear repeated vowel sounds where pitch and loudness were evaluated.
However, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, voice and speech therapists found it helpful to move in-person treatment evaluations to a virtual format such as telemedicine. Until the pandemic, experts in the field did not have the need to examine the accuracy for the procedures done online but now they realize that not all medical care easily translates to a remote format.
Voice therapy obtained remotely presents a unique challenge because clinicians must rely on acoustic recordings of the voice in order to evaluate the effectiveness of their treatments. However, one of the biggest problems is that many teleconferencing platforms distort sounds since each platform has its own audio enhancement algorithm that affects the quality of the sound.
In order to eliminate background noise since COVID-19, voice therapists learned that they now have to be aware of background noise when using telemedicine for voice and speech therapy via an external speaker over the teleconferencing platform.
Researchers at Boston University https://www.bu.edu, wanted to find out if popular teleconferencing platforms used for telemedicine could capture sounds accurately enough for clinicians to successfully treat and evaluate patients with voice and speech disorders. They put five different teleconferencing platforms to the test that included Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Doxy.me, VSee Messenger, and Zoom.
Zoom is the only platform that enables users to turn off the audio enhancement features, which enables researchers to test the platform’s original audio. Despite the enhancements, researchers have predicted that the ability to measure vocal fundamental frequency (pitch) and vocal intensity (loudness) through teleconferencing platforms has not been significantly affected.
The researchers did discover however, that all the teleconferencing platforms did a poor job at capturing many measurements needed to achieve accurate and clinically meaningful voice evaluations. Pitch varied significantly on all the virtual platforms as compared to the real life recording.
They also found the dynamic range of the vocal loudness measured over telepractice was very different from live recordings. This effect was even true for Zoom, where researchers were able to turn off the audio enhancements. Researchers found that Microsoft Teams performed the best since all the voice measures tested were the least affected using the platform.