To,

The Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (J-BHI)

Guest Editors, Special Issue on: Sensor Informatics for Managing Mental Health

Subject: Submission of research paper for J-BHI special issue

Dear Sir,
We are pleased to submit our research paper titled EchoAnalytics: Smartwatch-based Clinical Speech
Analytics for In-Home Patients with Parkinsons Disease to this special issue of J-BHI.
The patients with Parkinsons disease (PD), undergo speech treatment in guidance with speech-language
pathologist (SLP) in clinic. The speech exercises are recommended for patients while they are at home.
The SLPs could design effective speech therapy if they could monitor the patients while they perform
speech exercises while at home. In this paper, we discussed our results from in-home field trials of our
EchoWear technology. The EchoWear is a Wearable Internet of Things (WIOT) framework that uses
synergy between smartwatch worn by the patients and a companion android tablet connected to the cloud.
It collects the data in the cloud along with date and time stamp. The cloud is equipped with the Clinical
Speech Processing (CLIP) chain that automatically processes the speech data to generate speech quality
metrics (SQMs) such as loudness, pitch, jitter, shimmer and sensory pleasantness. These SQMs are later
used to generate speech quality reports that can be used by SLPs to remotely monitor the patients and/or
measure effectiveness of their personalized speech treatment. Every patient with PD has a different story
of communication deficits, and hence there is no one-size-fits-all solution for this problem. EchoAnalytics
empowers the SLPs with speech quality reports for convenient and inexpensive delivery of personalized
speech treatment with reduced logistics requirement. The presented research also provides our insights
about using the modern smartwatches as a health monitoring tool and challenges one needs to overcome
before they could be used in clinical practice.
We hope the Biomedical and Health Informatics community find our research interesting. We will
continue publishing our research for tackling some other bottlenecks in remote healhcare. We believe that
the paper is relevant to this special issue of J-BHI.

SUB-TRACK: Parkinson's disease, Speech Treatments

Sincerely,

Harishchandra Dubey, Cody Goldberg, Leslie Mahler, Kunal Mankodiya