Balancing Self-Tracking and Surveillance: Legal, Ethical and Technological Issues in Using Smartphones to Monitor Communication in People with Health Conditions.

Smartphones are being used to track the health of individuals in their own environments. For example, a smartphone app could be used to monitor the impact and progression of Parkinson's disease, as well as indicate whether treatments may need to be adjusted, based on an analysis of voice and discourse. The app uses smartphone audio sensors to detect when conversations are taking place and activates an app to record the conversation. But what happens if a background conversation is also collected by the recording? The participants of the background conversation are unaware of and have not consented to the recording. Unauthorised recording could also raise legal issues under surveillance devices legislation and has ethical implications. It is a complex task to balance the potential benefits of self-tracking of health conditions to consumers and the health system, with the legalities and ethical issues related to privacy. The health-related monitoring industry is moving so rapidly that current legal and ethical processes and protocols may fail to balance these concerns. This article explores Australian legal and ethical perspectives on how to achieve the potential benefits of these technological approaches while preserving privacy.

Adaptive Multi-Rate Compression Effects on Vowel Analysis.

Signal processing on digitally sampled vowel sounds for the detection of pathological voices has been firmly established. This work examines compression artifacts on vowel speech samples that have been compressed using the adaptive multi-rate codec at various bit-rates. Whereas previous work has used the sensitivity of machine learning algorithm to test for accuracy, this work examines the changes in the extracted speech features themselves and thus report new findings on the usefulness of a particular feature. We believe this work will have potential impact for future research on remote monitoring as the identification and exclusion of an ill-defined speech feature that has been hitherto used, will ultimately increase the robustness of the system.

Chat-Bots for People with Parkinson's Disease: Science Fiction or Reality?

People with Parkinson's disease are known to have difficulties in language and communication. This paper proposes the use of an artificial conversational agent, commonly known as a chat-bot that runs on a smart-phone device and performs two-way conversation with the user. In this paper, initial work on a Parkinson's disease themed chat-bot that interacts with the user relative to their symptoms is presented. Potential dialogues are provided to illustrate the various roles chat-bots can play in the management of Parkinson's disease. The chat-bot can be used for measuring voice and communication outcomes during the daily life of the user, and for gaining information about challenges encountered. Moreover, it is anticipated that it may also have an educational and support role. The chat-bot is now ready for usability testing with a clinical population.