Validation of speech measures against clinical constructs

Establish rigorous quantitative evidence linking commonly used voice and speech measures to their underlying clinical constructs, thereby advancing these measures from exploratory indicators toward a verified clinical knowledge base.

Background

The paper proposes a harmonized set of clinically interpretable acoustic measures and provides extraction code and normative values. However, the authors distinguish between defining and computing measures and demonstrating that those measures validly represent the clinical constructs of interest.

The unresolved problem is to rigorously and quantitatively validate the relationships between speech measures and underlying clinical constructs. Such evidence is necessary to support reliable interpretation, cross-study comparability, and the transition from exploratory speech analysis to clinically verified biomarkers.

References

While we have outlined the most common speech measures utilized across clinical studies and AI applications, rigorous evidence linking these measures to underlying clinical constructs has not yet been fully established.

— Towards clinical adoption of voice and speech as measures of health: the need for harmonization  (2609.28894 - Cummins et al., 24 Sep 2026) in Section 4, “Discussion and Future Outlook”