Speech analysis for acute decompensated heart failure: reporting a pilot study in Germany

Acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) has been shown to affect breathing and speech production. We present a new German speech dataset and conduct a pilot study to show the feasibility of using speech to distinguish between decompensated and recompensated ADHF. We achieve accuracy rates of $77\%$ for this binary classification using read speech, with the use of segmented phrases scoring at 75% and sustained vowels trailing far behind at 52%. Our feature analysis shows a reduction in breathiness and an increase in articulation stability during recompensation. Overall, our results show the promise of speech analysis in the monitoring of ADHF and demonstrate that further efforts should be invested to obtain large-scale data and replicate our results in more heterogeneous populations.