Animated Speech Therapist for Individuals with Parkinson Disease

1. Animated Speech Therapist for Individuals with Parkinson Disease Lori�s avatar 3D ANIMATED THRAPIST TECHNIQUES HEAD ANIMATION Visible speech Visible speech is produced by morphing between viseme targets. Facial expression To generate a large number of facial expressions, we enable independent control of separate facial components. Facial expression is controlled by 38 parameters using sliders in a dialog box. Head gesture Three types of head movements have been designed: head turning, head nodding and circular head movement Eye gesture Eye blink control and eye ball movement control, including circular eye ball movement. Smoothing facial expressions Three types of smoothing algorithms were designed to meet this requirement (1) An �easy in or easy out� algorithm, used to control animation speeds at different times so that the animation is more realistic; (2) Kochanek-Bartels cubic splines, in which three parameters such as tension, continuity and bias are used to produce smooth motion; (3) B-Splines. BODY ANIMATION A parameter driven skeleton/bone model is used to generate lifelike gestures. The skeleton/bones are considered as rigid objects. Each bone is driven by the specific joints' rotation parameters referenced by the three rotating axes. The movement of the skeleton/bone is controlled by the pre-defined rotation parameters set for each joint. Skeleton/bone structure Multi-level gesture description module Multi-level gesture description module has a three-level structure. The first level, the hand shape transcriber, is used to build the hand shape data. The second level, the sign transcriber, relies on the hand shape database and allows users to specify the location and motion of the two (left and right) arms.