You Sound Relaxed Now - Measuring Restorative Effects from Speech Signals

The recently proposed restorative environments have the potential to restore attention and help against fatigue, but how can these effects be verified? We present a novel measurement method which can analyze participants' speech signals in a study before and after a relaxing experience. Compared to other measurements such as attention scales or response tests, speech signal analysis is both less obtrusive and more accessible. In our study, we found that certain time- and frequency-domain speech features such as short-time energy and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are correlated with the attentional capacity measured by traditional ratings. We thus argue that speech signal analysis can provide a valid measure for attention and its restoration. We describe a practically feasible method for such a speech signal analysis along with some preliminary results.