Effect of physical exercise on voice in people living with COPD

Previous research on the effect of exercise on voice has been mainly performed in a healthy population. However, the competition between breathing and speaking might be more pronounced in people with COPD. We aimed to evaluate voice features change in people living with COPD after exercise. A prolonged vowel/a/and paced reading task were performed before and after an exercise task. In this exploratory study, differences were found in the sustained phonation for shimmer (apq5 and local), vowel duration, F1 frequency, and H1-A3 harmonic difference, when taking sex into account. Also, we saw a trend that voice features change by increasing COPD severity for HNR (mean) in the sustained phonation, and in the forced reading task for F2 frequency, H1-A3 harmonic difference (mean) and Hammarberg index. More research is needed using voice recordings from a larger sample size to confirm these findings, and possibly implement this in an exacerbation model using voice.