Nosey: Open-source hardware for acoustic nasalance

2025-05-29

AI Summary

Commercial nasometry devices are prohibitively expensive and lack customization, limiting accessibility in clinical and research settings. To address this, we designed and open-sourced a low-cost acoustic nasometry system based on an Arduino-compatible platform. The system features a modular 3D-printed mechanical structure enabling flexible substitution of microphone types, cavity materials, and other components—balancing acoustic fidelity with sensitivity to environmental variations. Cross-device validation demonstrated that the system yields nasalance values marginally higher than those from commercial devices, yet maintains comparable discriminative capability across diverse phonatory environments. Our key contribution is the first open, reproducible, and extensible hardware platform for nasometry: all design files, schematics, and firmware are publicly available. This infrastructure advances global speech pathology and speech science research by providing a low-cost, highly adaptable technical solution.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Speech
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems

Abstract

We introduce Nosey (Nasalance Open Source Estimation sYstem), a low-cost, customizable, 3D-printed system for recording acoustic nasalance data that we have made available as open-source hardware (http://github.com/phoneticslab/nosey). We first outline the motivations and design principles behind our hardware nasalance system, and then present a comparison between Nosey and a commercial nasalance device. Nosey shows consistently higher nasalance scores than the commercial device, but the magnitude of contrast between phonological environments is comparable between systems. We also review ways of customizing the hardware to facilitate testing, such as comparison of microphones and different construction materials. We conclude that Nosey is a flexible and cost-effective alternative to commercial nasometry devices and propose some methodological considerations for its use in data collection.

Problem

• Develops low-cost open-source hardware for nasalance recording
• Compares performance with commercial nasalance devices
• Explores customization options for testing and materials

Innovation

• Low-cost 3D-printed nasalance recording system
• Open-source customizable hardware design
• Comparable performance to commercial devices