Automatic evaluation of speech impairment caused by wearing a dental appliance.docVIP

Open Journal of Stomatology, 2013, 3, 365-369 OJST /10.4236/ojst.2013.37062 Published Online October 2013 (/journal/ojst/) Automatic evaluation of speech impairment caused by wearing a dental appliance Mariko Hattori , Yuka I. Sumita , Hisashi Taniguchi 1 2 2 1 2 Clinics for Oral and Maxillofacial Rehabilitation, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Tokyo, Japan Department of Maxillofacial Prosthetics, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Tokyo, Japan Email: sasamfp@tmd.ac.jp Received 4 August 2013; revised 4 September 2013; accepted 21 September 2013 Copyright ? 2013 Mariko Hattori et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT which play a role in speech production. In the field of dentistry, speech evaluation is important for the appro- priate orofacial dysfunction rehabilitation. Because the teeth and alveolar ridge are speech articulators, speech ability can be impaired by dental disorders such as miss- ing teeth or by maxillofacial disorders caused by surgical treatment affecting orofacial structures such as resection of tumors in bone and soft tissue like the palate or tongue. Prosthetic treatment can often be useful for speech reha- bilitation in such patients [1]. However, placement of dental appliances can sometimes compromise speech when the appliances interfere with articulation. For ex- ample, consonants are often affected by placing a new denture, and the patient needs time to compensate for this change [2]. Therefore, the speech of patients reha- bilitated with prosthesis should be carefully assessed and monitored. In dentistry, the speech intelligibility test is often used to assess speech and involves ev