A database for analysis of speech under physical stress: detection of exercise intensity while running and talking

One of the ways to gauge your own exercise intensity while running, is to assess your capability of talking while running: if you can still speak comfortably, you are running within the recommended intensity guidelines. This subjective way of estimating one's exercise intensity by talking (i.e. the Talk Test) motivated us to investigate how speech characteristics are affected during running and whether it is possible to develop a more objective way of estimating exercise intensity levels while running through voice analysis. To this end, we developed the Talk & Run Speech database that contains speech recorded from people before, during, and after running. We present our database and show that it is possible to detect exercise intensity below or above the anaerobic threshold in speech during running with a performance of 73.5% and 60.0% (unweighted average recall) for female and male speakers respectively.

[1]  G. Borg.  Psychophysical bases of perceived exertion. , 1982, Medicine and science in sports and exercise.

[2]  Yechiam Ostchega,et al.  Resting pulse rate reference data for children, adolescents, and adults: United States, 1999-2008. , 2011, National health statistics reports.

[3]  David P. Swain,et al.  Moderate- or Vigorous-Intensity Exercise: What Should We Prescribe? , 2006 .

[4]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Analysis and perception of speech under physical task stress , 2008, INTERSPEECH.

[5]  Björn W. Schuller,et al.  The Munich Biovoice Corpus: Effects of Physical Exercising, Heart Rate, and Skin Conductance on Human Speech Production , 2014, LREC.

[6]  J. Karvonen,et al.  Heart Rate and Exercise Intensity During Sports Activities , 1988, Sports medicine.

[7]  John P. Porcari,et al.  RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TALK TEST AND VENTILATORY THRESHOLD 10:45 AM , 1999 .

[8]  Björn Schuller,et al.  Opensmile: the munich versatile and fast open-source audio feature extractor , 2010, ACM Multimedia.

[9]  Natalie N. Shafer,et al.  Relationship between the talk test and ventilatory threshold , 2000 .

[10]  Fabien Ringeval,et al.  The INTERSPEECH 2014 computational paralinguistics challenge: cognitive & physical load , 2014, INTERSPEECH.

[11]  Daniel E Forman,et al.  Exercise standards for testing and training: a scientific statement from the American Heart Association. , 2013, Circulation.

[12]  Chih-Jen Lin,et al.  LIBSVM: A library for support vector machines , 2011, TIST.

[13]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Glottal Waveform Analysis of Physical Task Stress Speech , 2012, INTERSPEECH.

[14]  Bob Goode.  A Personal Insight into the Origin of the “Talk Test” , 2009 .

[15]  J Mertens,et al.  Voice, breathing, and the control of exercise intensity. , 1998, Advances in experimental medicine and biology.

[16]  J. Prochaska,et al.  Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: toward an integrative model of change. , 1983, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[17]  Bernd Johannes,et al.  Non-linear function model of voice pitch dependency on physical and mental load , 2007, European Journal of Applied Physiology.

[18]  B. Ainsworth,et al.  International physical activity questionnaire: 12-country reliability and validity. , 2003, Medicine and science in sports and exercise.

[19]  Stephen D. Anton,et al.  Differential Predictors of Adherence in Exercise Programs With Moderate Versus Higher Levels of Intensity and Frequency , 2005 .

[20]  Jürgen Trouvain,et al.  Prosodic characteristics of read speech before and after treadmill running , 2015, INTERSPEECH.

[21]  R. Shephard,et al.  A simple method to assess exercise behavior in the community. , 1969, Canadian journal of applied sport sciences. Journal canadien des sciences appliquees au sport.

[22]  Björn W. Schuller,et al.  Automatic recognition of physiological parameters in the human voice: Heart rate and skin conductance , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[23]  J. van der Kamp,et al.  The Power of Auditory-Motor Synchronization in Sports: Enhancing Running Performance by Coupling Cadence with the Right Beats , 2013, PloS one.

[24]  G J Bell,et al.  The Interactions of Intensity, Frequency and Duration of Exercise Training in Altering Cardiorespiratory Fitness , 1986, Sports medicine.

[25]  Carl Foster,et al.  Consistency of the talk test for exercise prescription. , 2004, Medicine and science in sports and exercise.

[26]  H. Alessio,et al.  Ventilation and speech characteristics during submaximal aerobic exercise. , 2008, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[27]  T. Quinn,et al.  The Talk Test and its relationship with the ventilatory and lactate thresholds , 2011, Journal of sports sciences.

[28]  C. Hardy,et al.  Not What, but How One Feels: The Measurement of Affect during Exercise , 1989 .

[29]  Carl Foster,et al.  The Talk Test as a Marker of Exercise Training Intensity , 2008, Journal of cardiopulmonary rehabilitation and prevention.

[30]  John H L Hansen,et al.  Analysis of the effects of physical task stress on the speech signal. , 2011, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.