Recording speech alongside a brain stimulation study

Speech assessment is a substudy to the STIMPulseControl study (hereinafter referred to as the main study), where audio recordings of patients voices will be recorded as part of a speech analysis in the main study, for this optional ancillary study.

Speech of all study patients enrolled in the STIMPulseControl main study will be recorded at three points of time in a standardized way. Following this ancillary protocol, patients speech will be recorded at the baseline visit (preoperatively), at the 6-months visit and at the 12-months visit postoperatively. For the baseline speech assessment the same protocol will be performed in chronic medication conditions. At 12-month follow up, we will repeat the speech protocol in chronic medication and stimulation condition. The recordings will be done in each centre in a decentralized way and the audio files will be produced according to a standardized protocol, and assisted by a step-by-step guided speech recording software. Main aims and hypothesis for automated speech analysis study are safety measures for surgical interventions in PD assessment of parkinsonian (hypokinetic) motor speech features outcome after STN-DBS, assessment of dyskinetic (hyperkinetic) motor speech features outcome after STN-DBS, assessment of capsular speech features outcome after STN-DBS in PD emotional and cognitive speech outcomes to be used in surgical and pharmacological interventions in PD assessment of acoustic and linguistic speech features as proxy for behaviour and cognitive changes in PD, comparison of emotional and cognitive speech outcomes before and 1-year after STN-DBS + BMT vs BMT alone.