Secure account-based data capture with smartphones – preliminary results from a study of articulatory precision in clinical depression

Abstract

Smartphone technology is continuously being updated through software and hardware changes. At present, a limited number of studies have been undertaken to assess the impact of these changes on data collection for linguistic research. This paper discusses the potential of smartphones to gather reliable recordings, along with ethical considerations for storing additional personal information when working in other contexts (i.e. healthcare settings). A pilot study was undertaken using the FitvoiceTM account-based application to analyse articulatory proficiency in depressed and healthy participants. Results suggest that phonetic differences exist between these groups in terms of plosive production, and that smartphones are capable of adequately recording these minute aspects of the speech signal for analysis.