AN OVERVIEW OF THE FIRST ICASSP SPECIAL SESSION ON COMPUTER AUDITION FOR HEALTHCARE

Audio has been increasingly used as a novel digital phenotype that carries important information of the subject's health status. We can find tremendous efforts given to this young and promising field, i. e., computer audition for healthcare (CA4H), whereas the application scenarios have not been fully studied as compared to its counterpart in medical areas, computer vision. To this end, the first special session held at ICASSP 2020 was dedicated to the topic. In this overview paper, we at first summarise the invited high-quality contributions from leading scientists from a multi- disciplinary background. Then, we provide a detailed grouping of the contributions to several scenarios such as body sound analysis (e. g., heart sound), human speech analysis (e. g., stress detection), and artificial hearing technologies (e. g., cochlear implants). In addition to the collected works, we will compare them with other recent studies within the topic. Finally, we conclude the limitations and perspectives of the current stage. It is interesting and encouraging to find that the state-of-the-art machine learning and audio signal processing techniques have been successfully applied in the health domain, e. g., to fight with the global challenges of COVID-19 and ageing population.