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The Objectives of this study are (1) to evaluate tone production in Mandarin-speaking patients with post-stroke dysarthria (PSD) using an artificial neural network (ANN), (2) to investigate the efficacy of recognition performance of the ANN model contrast to the human listeners and the convolutional neural network (CNN) model, and (3) to explore rehabilitation application of the artificial intelligence recognition for lexical tone production disorder with PSD. The subjects include two groups of native Mandarin speaking adults: 31 patients with PSD and 42 normal-speaking adults (NA) in a similar age range as controls. Each subject was recorded producing a list of 7 Mandarin monosyllables with 4 tones (i.e., a total of 28 tokens). The fundamental frequency (F0) of each monosyllable was extracted using auto-correlation algorithm. The ANN was trained with F0 data of the tone tokens from the NA, to generate the final model. The recognition rates of the human ears, ANN model, and CNN model were 87.78% ± 8.96% (mean ± SD), 89.11% ±11.80%, 65.91% ± 8.79% respectively for tone production of NA group; 70.28% ± 17.61%, 63.35% ± 17.40%, 34.71% ± 6.92% respectively for tone production of PSD group. For PSD group, there was significant correlation between the performance of the ANN model and human listeners (r = 0.826, P

Purpose: To explore the fever-related risk factors of inpatients in Rehabilitation Department, and to provide reference for patients with high risk of fever to take corresponding nursing measures. Methods: The study was conducted on the Rehabilitation Department of The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University from July 2019 to December 2019. The fever group included 51 patients and the non-fever group included 49 patients without fever. The two groups of clinical data, comorbidities, related laboratory values, possible risk factors of fever were analyzed by case regression analysis, and the relevant risk factors were screened out by LASSO (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) regression analysis. Results: According to the results of Lasso regression analysis, pressure sore or skin infection, history of hypertension, current history of respiratory tract infection, feeding patterns were the higher risk factors of fever in inpatients in Rehabilitation Department, while the first course of disease, main diagnosis, history of respiratory tract infection within half a year, kidney damage and hospitalization days were lower risk factors. Conclusion: This study is helpful to early identify the fever risk of inpatients in Rehabilitation Department, and provide reference basis for high-risk fever patients to take positive and effective nursing measures.

This study investigated the acoustic features of vowel production in Mandarin-speaking patients with post-stroke dysarthria (PSD). The subjects included 31 native Mandarin-speaking patients with PSD (age: 25–83 years old) and 38 neurologically normal adults in a similar age range (age: 21–76 years old). Each subject was recorded producing a list of Mandarin monosyllables that included six monophthong vowels (i.e., /a, i, u, ɤ, y, o/) embedded in the /CV/ context. The patients’ speech samples were evaluated by two native Mandarin speakers. The evaluation scores were then used to classify all patients into two levels of severity: mild or moderate-to-severe. Formants (F1 and F2) were extracted from each vowel token. Results showed that all vowel categories in the patients with PSD were produced with more variability than in the healthy speakers. Great overlaps between vowel categories and reduced vowel space were observed in the patients. The magnitude of the vowel dispersion and overlap between vowel categories increased as a function of the severity of the disorder. The deviations of the vowel acoustic features in the patients in comparison to the healthy speakers may provide guidance for clinical rehabilitation to improve the speech intelligibility of patients with PSD.

The present study aimed to identify certain acoustic parameters for speech evaluation in cerebral palsy children with dysarthria.The subject included 30 native Mandarin-Speaking children with cerebral palsy, who were 5-15 years old, and 13 healthy children in a similar age range. Each subject was recorded while producing a list of 12 Mandarin words, which included three syllables ('ba', 'bi' and 'du'), in all four Mandarin tones. The formants (F1 and F2) of monophthong vowels /a, i, u/ were extracted from each vowel token. Based on F1 and F2, the vowel acoustic indexes VSA, VAI and FCR were calculated and analyzed.Compared with the control group, the cerebral palsy group had significantly low F1 and F2 in vowel /a/ (P 0.05), and F2 in vowel /i/ (P 0.05), while F1 and F2 in vowel /u/ and F1 in vowel /i/ had no significant difference. Between the healthy group and cerebral palsy group, the differences in VSA, VAI and FCR were all statistically significant.Children with cerebral palsy have reduced vowel space and speech articulation. The significant difference in vowel acoustic indexes (VSA, VAI and FCR) among the two groups revealed that the three indexes were sensitive to the variation of the vowels production in children with cerebral palsy, and that these may be used as an evaluation method of speech intelligibility caused by impaired vowel pronunciation in children with cerebral palsy, and the effect of rehabilitation therapy.

Objective: To explore the difference of fall prevention knowledge level of nurses working on special care units and general care units in acute hospitals. Methods: Nurses in special care units and general care units from two acute care hospitals were investigated about fall prevention through a cross-sectional survey. The collected data was analyzed by using Lasso Regression Model. Results: Total of 1442 valid questionnaires were conducted including 1028 questionnaires in general care units and 414 questionnaires in special care units respectively. Through analysis by Lasso Regression Model, seven of 17 fall prevention knowledge items were statistically different in nurses working on general care units and special care units, including the definition of a fall (P=0.0001), fall prevention assessment tool currently used (p=0.0053), assessment of patient's balance and activity (p=0.0020), diseases that easily cause patients to fall (p=0.0021), assessment of patient's foot problems (p=0.0068), assessments of the patient's clothing and footwear suitability (p=0.0011), reporting process of falls (p

Aims: The aim of this survey was to investigate the background of speech-language pathologists and their training needs to provide a profile of the current state of the profession in Mainland China. Methods: A survey was conducted of 293 speech-language therapists. The questionnaire used asked questions related to their career background and had a 24-item ranking scale covering almost all of the common speech-language-hearing disorders. A summary of the raw data was constructed by calculating the average ranking score for each answer choice in order to determine the academic training needs with the highest preference among the respondents. Results: The majority of respondents were female, Conclusion: The results revealed that speech-language therapists in Mainland China tend to be young, with little total working experience and at the first stage of their career. This may be due to the lack of systematic educational programs and national certification systems for speech-language therapists.

This study investigated the acoustic features of vowel production in Mandarin-speaking patients with post-stroke spastic dysarthria. The subjects included 31 native Mandarin-speaking patients with post-stroke spastic dysarthria (age: 33–73 years old) and 40 normal adults in a similar age range (age: 22–68 years old). Each subject were recorded producing a list of 28 Mandarin monosyllables that composed of six monophthong vowels (i.e., /a, o, ɣ, i, u, y/) embedded in the /CV/ context. The patients’ speech samples were evaluated by two native Mandarin speakers. The evaluation scores were then used to classify each patient into one of the two categories: mild or moderate-to-severe severity. Midpoint F1 and F2 of each vowel token were extracted and normalized. Results showed no significant differences between the patients and normal speakers on vowel duration. However, the vowel categories in the patients were more scattered and greatly overlapped than in the normal speakers. The magnitude of the vowel disper...