Crowdsourced Perceptual Ratings of Voice Quality in People With Parkinson's Disease Before and After Intensive Voice and Articulation Therapies: Secondary Outcome of a Randomized Controlled Trial.

PURPOSE: Limited research has examined the suitability of crowdsourced ratings to measure treatment effects in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), particularly for constructs such as voice quality. This study obtained measures of reliability and validity for crowdsourced listeners' ratings of voice quality in speech samples from a published study. We also investigated whether aggregated listener ratings would replicate the original study's findings of treatment effects based on the Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) measure. METHOD: This study reports a secondary outcome measure of a randomized controlled trial with speakers with dysarthria associated with PD, including two active comparators (Lee Silverman Voice Treatment [LSVT LOUD] and LSVT ARTIC), an inactive comparator (untreated PD), and a healthy control group. Speech samples from three time points (pretreatment, posttreatment, and 6-month follow-up) were presented in random order for rating as "typical" or "atypical" with respect to voice quality. Untrained listeners were recruited through the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform until each sample had at least 25 ratings. RESULTS: Intrarater reliability for tokens presented repeatedly was substantial (Cohen's κ = .65-.70), and interrater agreement significantly exceeded chance level. There was a significant correlation of moderate magnitude between the AVQI and the proportion of listeners classifying a given sample as "typical." Consistent with the original study, we found a significant interaction between group and time point, with the LSVT LOUD group alone showing significantly higher perceptually rated voice quality at posttreatment and follow-up relative to the pretreatment time point. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that crowdsourcing can be a valid means to evaluate clinical speech samples, even for less familiar constructs such as voice quality. The findings also replicate the results of the study by Moya-Galé et al. (2022) and support their functional relevance by demonstrating that the effects of treatment measured acoustically in that study are perceptually apparent to everyday listeners.

Using Crowdsourced Listeners' Ratings to Measure Speech Changes in Hypokinetic Dysarthria: A Proof-of-Concept Study.

Purpose Interventions for speech disorders aim to produce changes that are not only acoustically measurable or perceptible to trained professionals but are also apparent to naive listeners. Due to challenges associated with obtaining ratings from suitably large listener samples, however, few studies currently evaluate speech interventions by this criterion. Online crowdsourcing technologies could enhance the measurement of intervention effects by making it easier to obtain real-world listeners' ratings. Method Stimuli, drawn from a published study by Sapir et al. ("Effects of intensive voice treatment (Lee Silverman Voice Treatment [LSVT]) on vowel articulation in dysarthric individuals with idiopathic Parkinson disease: Acoustic and perceptual findings" in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(4), 2007), were words produced by individuals who received intensive treatment (LSVT LOUD) for hypokinetic dysarthria secondary to Parkinson's disease. Thirty-six online naive listeners heard randomly ordered pairs of words elicited pre- and posttreatment and reported which they perceived as "more clearly articulated." Results Mixed-effects logistic regression indicated that words elicited posttreatment were significantly more likely to be rated "more clear." Across individuals, acoustically measured magnitude of change was significantly correlated with pre-post difference in listener ratings. Conclusions These results partly replicate the findings of Sapir et al. (2007) and demonstrate that their acoustically measured changes are detectable by everyday listeners. This supports the viability of using crowdsourcing to obtain more functionally relevant measures of change in clinical speech samples. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12170112.

Validation of the Timed Up and Go Test for Assessing Balance Variables in Adults Aged 65 and Older.

The Timed Up and Go (TUG) test is recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an easy to administer clinical test to evaluate a senior citizen's fall risk. Limited evidence has been presented in the literature validating the TUG test. In this study, the authors sought to assess correlations between the TUG test and various balance markers utilizing the OptoGait system. A total of 51 healthy seniors completed randomized trials of the TUG test and a gait test utilizing OptoGait photoelectric technology. Correlations among mean and SD values for these variables and TUG performance were calculated. Utilizing a Bonferroni adjustment and an alpha level of .05, eight significant correlations of a moderately strong degree (absolute r scores between .51 and .78) emerged. Correlation results indicate that the TUG test is a valid tool for screening balance deficits that lead to increased fall risk in senior citizens.

PACER Performance of Children Aged 11-14 With Attention-Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.

PURPOSE: The purposes of this study were to examine the performance on the progressive aerobic cardiovascular endurance run (PACER) test in children with and without attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) over the course of a school year, and also to investigate the possible influence of age, sex, school sport participation, and body mass index on results. METHODS: Utilizing a repeated measures design, 892 middle school children aged 11-14 years (mean = 12.25, SD = 0.94) including 55 children with ADHD participated. While controlling for age, sex, sports participation, and body mass index, children were tested on the PACER 3 times during the school year. Procedures specified in the FITNESSGRAM test manual were explicitly followed. Hierarchical linear modeling was applied to analyze the data. RESULTS: Children with ADHD performed 8.6 fewer laps at intercept (baseline), than did healthy children without ADHD (t878 = -6.20, P < .001). However, no significant differences emerged for time (slope). In addition, no significant interactions were found for ADHD with age, sex, sports participation, or body mass index. CONCLUSION: A diagnosis of ADHD, independent of selected predictor variables, explained lower PACER performance.

Validation of the OptoGait System for Monitoring Treatment and Recovery of Post-Concussion Athletes.

OBJECTIVE: This study sought to investigate correlations between OptoGait motion analysis technology and 2 commonly used concussion assessment instruments, the Balance Evaluation Scoring System (BESS) and the Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing (ImPACT) computerized neurocognitive assessment software, to see if OptoGait might be a valid concussion assessment tool. METHODS: Twenty Division-1 college women varsity soccer players completed trials of 8 different conditions of the OptoGait test battery. Then participants completed the BESS and ImPACT tests. One hundred twenty-eight total spatiotemporal variables were recorded for each trial of OptoGait. Pearson's r correlations among these variables and BESS and ImPACT results were calculated, and pattern analysis was completed to evaluate for emergent patterns in the data. RESULTS: Correlations for the 8 OptoGait mean-score subtests were related to the balance double-leg foam test (BESS). Correlations for the 8 OptoGait mean-score subtests were related to the balance double-leg foam test (BESS), and correlations between OptoGait standard deviation measures and the balance tandem hard surface test (BESS) both indicated potentially significant patterns. No consistent patterns of correlation existed between the OptoGait variables and the ImPACT results. CONCLUSION: OptoGait conditions correlate at higher than predicted rates with subtests of the BESS instruments but not the ImPACT measures.