Monitoring Parkinson’s Disease Rehabilitation from Phonation Biomechanics

Abstract

Neuromotor disease rehabilitation may benefit from certain phonation tasks as singing exercises. A protocol is being designed to combine certain rehabilitation tasks, consisting in respiratory and phonation, while carrying out simple singing drills. The objective evaluation of phonation before, during and after singing exercises is conducted from the estimation of biomechanical features of the glottal source. These features are compared using information theory and quadratic entropy principles. Results from Parkinson Disease patients under the rehabilitation programme are presented and discussed.