Towards the Objective Speech Assessment of Smoking Status based on Voice Features: A Review of the Literature
This addresses the need for objective validation of self-reported smoking status in clinical cessation practice, but it is incremental as it reviews existing literature rather than presenting new results.
The paper reviewed whether smoking alters voice features and if voice-based assessment can objectively validate smoking status in cessation research, finding potential for this method but without concrete performance numbers.
In smoking cessation clinical research and practice, objective validation of self-reported smoking status is crucial for ensuring the reliability of the primary outcome, that is, smoking abstinence. Speech signals convey important information about a speaker, such as age, gender, body size, emotional state, and health state. We investigated (1) if smoking could measurably alter voice features, (2) if smoking cessation could lead to changes in voice, and therefore (3) if the voice-based smoking status assessment has the potential to be used as an objective smoking cessation validation method.