"Wearing Masks and Voice Tests Both Show 'Excellent' Accuracy and Safety"

A study has found that voice tests conducted while wearing a mask can be as precise as those conducted without a mask.

Professor Lim Jae-yeol, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Gangnam Severance Hospital (left), Professor Lee Seung-jin, Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Hallym University.

Professor Lim Jae-yeol of the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at Gangnam Severance Hospital and Professor Lee Seung-jin of the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Hallym University, along with their research team, announced on the 14th that they confirmed this through a study on "Reliability of voice test measurements during the pandemic era in patients with voice disorders and healthy individuals."

Mask-wearing has long been considered an obstacle to voice testing because it obscures lip movements and muffles sound, reducing speech clarity. However, it had not been established whether mask-wearing compromises the acoustic reliability of voice tests.

The research team compared voice results of 120 patients with unilateral vocal cord paralysis and vocal cord dysfunction and 40 healthy adults before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants produced Korean phrases and 4-second vowel samples for voice testing, and the test results were derived based on these samples.

The results showed no differences in key variables indicating voice quality, such as Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) and its standard deviation (σ), frequency variation rate (Jitter), amplitude variation rate (Shimmer), noise-to-harmonics ratio (NHR), and the Acoustic Psychometric Severity Index of Dysphonia (APSID).

No significant difference was found in the area under the curve (AUC) of the acoustic parameter CPP, which is known to be most closely related to voice quality, between cohorts. [Data provided by Gangnam Severance Hospital]

Professor Lim Jae-yeol said, "Although indoor and outdoor mask mandates have been lifted as the COVID-19 outbreak has subsided recently, masks are still required in hospitals, making the reliability of voice tests even more important at this time. This study shows that voice tests during the pandemic were conducted consistently and accurately regardless of mask-wearing."

He added, "This can alleviate concerns about the reliability of voice tests conducted while wearing masks. We expect that clinical settings will continue to perform accurate voice tests while managing patient infection control."

This study was published in the international phonetics journal Journal of Voice.