The Objective and Subjective Sleepiness Voice Corpora

Following patients with chronic sleep disorders involves multiple appointments between doctors and patients which often results in episodic follow-ups with unevenly spaced interviews. Speech technologies and virtual doctors can help improve this follow-up. However, there are still some challenges to overcome: sleepiness measurements are diverse and are not always correlated, and most past research focused on detecting instantaneous sleepiness levels of healthy sleep-deprived subjects. This article presents a large database to assess the sleepiness level of highly phenotyped patients that complain from excessive daytime sleepiness. Based on the Multiple Sleep Latency Test, it differs from existing databases by multiple aspects. First, it is composed of recordings from patients suffering from excessive daytime sleepiness instead of sleep deprived healthy subjects. Second, it incites the subjects to sleep contrary to existing stressing sleepiness deprivation experimental paradigms. Third, the sleepiness level of the patients is evaluated with different temporal granularities - long term sleepiness and short term sleepiness - and both objective and subjective sleepiness measures are collected. Finally, it relies on the recordings of 94 highly phenotyped patients, allowing to unravel the influences of different physical factors (age, sex, weight,...) on voice.