DEVELOPMENT OF A TEST SYSTEM FOR VOICE MONITORING CONTACT SENSOR: PHONATORY SYSTEM SIMULATOR

Contact microphones are the best tool for monitoring the health of the phonatory system in a non-invasive way, to record the voice activity in order to extract reliable parameter useful to diagnose voice diseases like dysphonia, polyps and nodules. After testing different contact microphones on many human subjects arise the need of a proper characterization, since the in vivo tests suffer from lack of reproducibility due to the biological variability and to the absence of a strong reference. For this purpose a phonatory system simulator has been created, an apparatus that can mimic the biological system on which the sensors has to work. Such an apparatus has been validate and four different contact sensor has been tested with it.