EWA-DB, Slovak Database of Speech Affected by Neurodegenerative Diseases

A new Slovak speech database EWA-DB was created for research purposes aimed at early detection of neurodegenerative diseases from speech. It contains 1649 speakers performing various speech and language tasks, such as sustained vowel phonation, diadochokinesis, naming and picture description. The sample of speakers consists of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, Parkinson’s disease, and healthy controls. In this article we describe the EWA-DB development process, the language and speech task selection, patient and healthy control recruitment, as well as the testing and recording protocol. The structure and content of the database and file formats are described in detail. We assume that the presented database could be suitable for the development of automatic systems predicting the diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, and Parkinson’s disease from language and speech features.