Publication
Analysis of speech under stress and cognitive load in USAR operations
Marcela Charfuelan Oliva; Geert-Jan Kruijff
In: Procedings of IWSDS 2012: Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones. International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS-2012), November 28-30, Paris, France, 2012.
Abstract
This paper presents on-going work on analysis of speech under stress and
cognitive load in speech recordings of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) training
operations. During the training operations several team members communicate with
other members on the field and members on the control command using only one radio
channel. The type of stress encountered in the USAR domain, more specifically
on the human team communication, includes both physical or psychological stress
and cognitive task load. Physical stress due to the real situation and cognitive task
load due to tele-operation of robots and equipment. We were able to annotate and
identify the acoustic correlates of these two types of stress on the recordings. Traditional
prosody features and acoustic features extracted at sub-band level probed to
be robust to discriminate among the different types of stress and neutral data