Voice Biofeedback via Bone Conduction Headphones Impacts Voices of People with Voice Disorders

What is it about?

Can technology provide biofeedback that reduces voice disorders? Currently, voice biofeedback in speech-language pathology focuses on alerting people when their voice production becomes harmful, but there has been minimal research about biofeedback that addresses how people perceive their own voice while speaking. It would be helpful to the field of speech pathology to develop biofeedback technology that addresses auditory-motor impairments in people with voice disorders, and that's what this project aimed to do. This study involved nearly 50 patients diagnosed with various voice disorders who consented to the study at the Lakeshore Professional Voice Center. We explored the possibility of using a special type of headphone to deliver real-time voice biofeedback.

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Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Across all of the patients, we found that a high level of this type of biofeedback resulted in adjustments in the way they produced their voice. Specifically, the high-level of feedback resulted in a softer and breathier voice. This extends a previously studied phenomenon called the Fletcher Effect to bone conduction. So, what does this mean? In voice therapy, a softer and breathy voice may be a target of treatment, so the use of these bone conduction headphones for biofeedback is worthy of future scientific research to eventually be implemented in voice therapy.

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