The incorporation of the cloud technology with the Internet of Things (IoT) is significant in order to obtain better performance for a seamless, continuous, and ubiquitous framework. IoT has many applications in the healthcare sector, one of these applications is voice pathology monitoring. Unfortunately, voice pathology has not gained much attention, where there is an urgent need in this area due to the shortage of research and diagnosis of lethal diseases. Most of the researchers are focusing on the voice pathology and their finding is only to differentiating either the voice is normal (healthy) or pathological voice, where there is a lack of the current studies for detecting a certain disease such as laryngeal cancer. In this paper, we present an extensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques and studies of IoT frameworks and machine learning algorithms used in the healthcare in general and in the voice pathology surveillance systems in particular. Furthermore, this paper also presents applications, challenges and key issues of both IoT and machine learning algorithms in the healthcare. Finally, this paper highlights some open issues of IoT in healthcare that warrant further research and investigation in order to present an easy, comfortable and effective diagnosis and treatment of disease for both patients and doctors.

The results supported the need for identifying the risk group for OSA among express bus drivers and the need to diagnose them early for an early intervention.

A 59-year-old man with a background of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was diagnosed with a large mixed laryngopyocele that was successfully drained and marsupialized endoscopically using suction diathermy without requiring tracheostomy. Because of the rareness of the case, we performed a systematic review. Of 61 papers published between 1952 and 2015, we reviewed 23 cases written in English that described the number of cases, surgical approaches, resort to tracheostomy, complications, and outcomes. Four cases of laryngopyoceles were managed endoscopically using a cold instrument, microdebrider, or laser. Eighteen cases were operated on via an external approach, and 1 case applied both approaches. One of 4 endoscopic and 10 of 18 external approaches involved tracheostomy. Management using suction diathermy for excision and marsupialization of a laryngopyocele has never been reported and can be recommended as a feasible method due to its widespread availability. In the presence of a large laryngopyocele impeding the airway, tracheostomy may be averted in a controlled setting.

In the last decade, the implementation of machine learning algorithms in the analysis of voice disorder is paramount in order to provide a non-invasive voice pathology detection by only using audio signal. In spite of that, most recent systems of voice pathology work on a limited acoustic database. In other words, the systems use one vowel, such as /a/, and ignore sentences and other vowels when analyzing the audio signal. Other key issues that should be considered in the systems are accuracy and time consumption of an algorithm. Online Sequential Extreme Learning Machine (OSELM) is one of the machine learning algorithms that can be regarded as a rapid and accurate algorithm in the classification process. Therefore, this paper presents a voice pathology detection and classification system by using OSELM algorithm as a classifier, and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) as a featured extraction. In this work, the voice samples were taken from the Saarbrücken voice database (SVD). This system involves two parts of the database; the first part includes all voices in SVD with sentences and vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/, which are uttered in high, low, and normal pitches; and the second part utilizes voice samples of the common three types of pathologies (cyst, polyp, and paralysis) based on the vowel /a/ that is produced in normal pitch. The experimental results have shown that OSELM was able to achieve the highest accuracy up to 91.17%, 94% of precision, and 91% of recall. Furthermore, OSELM obtained 87%, 87.55%, and 97.67% for f-measure, G-mean, and specificity, respectively. The proposed system also presents a high ability to achieve detection and classification results in real-time clinical applications.

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IOP increase is significantly more in OSAS patients on prolong supine position.

IntroductionA functioning voice is essential for normal human communication. A good voice requires two moving vocal folds; if one fold is paralysed (unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP)) people suffer from a breathy, weak voice that tires easily and is unable to function normally. UVFP can also result in choking and breathlessness. Current treatment for adults with UVFP is speech therapy to stimulate recovery of vocal fold (VF) motion or function and/or injection of the paralysed VF with a material to move it into a more favourable position for the functioning VF to close against. When these therapies are unsuccessful, or only provide temporary relief, surgery is offered. Two available surgical techniques are: (1) surgical medialisation; placing an implant near the paralysed VF to move it to the middle (thyroplasty) and/or repositioning the cartilage (arytenoid adduction) or (2) restoring the nerve supply to the VF (laryngeal reinnervation). Currently there is limited evidence to determine which surgery should be offered to adults with UVFP.Methods and analysisA feasibility study to test the practicality of running a multicentre, randomised clinical trial of surgery for UVFP, including: (1) a qualitative study to understand the recruitment process and how it operates in clinical centres and (2) a small randomised trial of 30 participants recruited at 3 UK sites comparing non-selective laryngeal reinnervation to type I thyroplasty. Participants will be followed up for 12 months. The primary outcome focuses on recruitment and retention, with secondary outcomes covering voice, swallowing and quality of life.Ethics and disseminationEthical approval was received from National Research Ethics Service—Committee Bromley (reference 11/LO/0583). In addition to dissemination of results through presentation and publication of peer-reviewed articles, results will be shared with key clinician and patient groups required to develop the future large-scale randomised controlled trial.Trial registration numberISRCTN90201732; 16 December 2015.

We describe a case of non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection of the larynx in a previously well, immunocompetent young woman. Laryngeal mycobacterial infection is rare and currently accounts for less than 1% of all cases. A diagnostic dilemma often occurs because it may mimic laryngeal carcinoma, chronic laryngitis, or laryngeal candidiasis. This case highlights the importance of considering non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection in the differential diagnosis of laryngeal lesions.