Automatic measurement of speech understanding using EEG

ended

In medicine, it is often essential to know to what extent a person can understand speech. Current methods to measure speech understanding involve playing specially crafted sentences to the person, letting the person repeat them, and scoring the result manually. This requires active participation of the person, specialised speech material, and is labour intensive. We present a system to measure speech understanding fully automatically. We record brain responses while the person listens to a recording of natural speech, and apply signal processing to derive speech intelligibility. The person does not need to actively participate, which enables testing of a large variety of populations that cannot be tested with traditional methods, such as young children and people with mental impairment. The measurement result relates to everyday communication skills. Our system will make diagnostics cheaper and enable diagnostics outside a specialized clinical center because the system can operate fully automatically.