van den Berg, Rosanne L;
de Boer, Casper;
Zwan, Marissa D;
Jutten, Roos J;
van Liere, Mariska;
van de Glind, Marie-Christine ABJ;
Dubbelman, Mark A;
... Sikkes, Sietske AM; + view all
(2024)
Digital remote assessment of speech acoustics in cognitively unimpaired adults: feasibility, reliability and associations with amyloid pathology.
Alzheimer's Research & Therapy
, 16
(1)
, Article 176. 10.1186/s13195-024-01543-3.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND: Digital speech assessment has potential relevance in the earliest, preclinical stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). We evaluated the feasibility, test-retest reliability, and association with AD-related amyloid-beta (Aβ) pathology of speech acoustics measured over multiple assessments in a remote setting. METHODS: Fifty cognitively unimpaired adults (Age 68 ± 6.2 years, 58% female, 46% Aβ-positive) completed remote, tablet-based speech assessments (i.e., picture description, journal-prompt storytelling, verbal fluency tasks) for five days. The testing paradigm was repeated after 2-3 weeks. Acoustic speech features were automatically extracted from the voice recordings, and mean scores were calculated over the 5-day period. We assessed feasibility by adherence rates and usability ratings on the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. Test-retest reliability was examined with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs). We investigated the associations between acoustic features and Aβ-pathology, using linear regression models, adjusted for age, sex and education. RESULTS: The speech assessment was feasible, indicated by 91.6% adherence and usability scores of 86.0 ± 9.9. High reliability (ICC ≥ 0.75) was found across averaged speech samples. Aβ-positive individuals displayed a higher pause-to-word ratio in picture description (B = -0.05, p = 0.040) and journal-prompt storytelling (B = -0.07, p = 0.032) than Aβ-negative individuals, although this effect lost significance after correction for multiple testing. CONCLUSION: Our findings support the feasibility and reliability of multi-day remote assessment of speech acoustics in cognitively unimpaired individuals with and without Aβ-pathology, which lays the foundation for the use of speech biomarkers in the context of early AD.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Digital remote assessment of speech acoustics in cognitively unimpaired adults: feasibility, reliability and associations with amyloid pathology |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1186/s13195-024-01543-3 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13195-024-01543-3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
| Keywords: | Alzheimer’s disease, Amyloid, Digital biomarker, Language, Remote assessment, Speech acoustics, Humans, Female, Male, Aged, Feasibility Studies, Reproducibility of Results, Middle Aged, Speech Acoustics, Alzheimer Disease, Amyloid beta-Peptides, Speech |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Brain Repair and Rehabilitation |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10195564 |
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