A preliminary study on self-care telemonitoring of dysarthria in spinal muscular atrophy

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a rare neuromuscular disease which may cause impairments in oro-facial musculature. Most of the individuals with SMA present bulbar signs such as flaccid dysarthria which mines their abilities to speak and, as consequence, their psychic balance. To support clinicians, recent work has demonstrated the feasibility of video-based techniques for assessing the oro-facial functions in patients with neurological disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. However, no work has so far focused on automatic and quantitative monitoring of dysarthria in SMA. To overcome limitations this work's aim is to propose a cloud-based store-and-forward telemonitoring system for automatic and quantitative evaluation of oro-facial muscles in individuals with SMA. The system integrates a convolutional neural network (CNN) aimed at identifying the position of facial landmarks from video recordings acquired via a web application by an SMA patient.Clinical relevance-The proposed work is in the preliminary stage, but it represents the first step towards a better understanding of the bulbar-functions' evolution in patients with SMA.