Respiratory Panel
The respiratory panel reads breath support, airway turbulence, and phonatory efficiency from speech. It is most sensitive on a sustained vowel ("aaah") or a standard read passage, and is designed to surface drift in conditions like asthma, COPD, and lower-respiratory infection before a patient reports worsening symptoms.
Features
Each feature is returned raw under panels.respiratory.features and folded into the panel score.
| Feature | Meaning |
|---|---|
| shimmer | Cycle-to-cycle amplitude variation. Rises with airway irritation and reduced breath support. |
| hnr_db | Harmonics-to-noise ratio (dB). Falls as breathiness and turbulence increase. |
| expiratory_ratio | Share of the utterance spent on the outbreath. Shortens as expiratory effort drops. |
| cpp | Cepstral peak prominence. A robust marker of dysphonia and vocal fold efficiency. |
| mpt_s | Maximum phonation time on a sustained vowel (s). A direct proxy for respiratory reserve. |
Best elicitation
Pass task: "sustained_vowel" for the cleanest respiratory signal, or task: "cough" when a forced expiratory sample is available. Aim for ≥5 seconds at 16kHz or higher in a quiet room.
Drift, not diagnosis
The panel reports how far a sample sits from the patient's own baseline — it is a screening and monitoring signal, not a diagnosis. See Interpreting Scores for how score, baseline_z, and drift relate.