  Dysarthria is a condition which hampers the ability of an individual to
control the muscles that play a major role in speech delivery. The loss of fine
control over muscles that assist the movement of lips, vocal chords, tongue and
diaphragm results in abnormal speech delivery. One can assess the severity
level of dysarthria by analyzing the intelligibility of speech spoken by an
individual. Continuous intelligibility assessment helps speech language
pathologists not only study the impact of medication but also allows them to
plan personalized therapy. It helps the clinicians immensely if the
intelligibility assessment system is reliable, automatic, simple for (a)
patients to undergo and (b) clinicians to interpret. Lack of availability of
dysarthric data has resulted in development of speaker dependent automatic
intelligibility assessment systems which requires patients to speak a large
number of utterances. In this paper, we propose (a) a cost minimization
procedure to select an optimal (small) number of utterances that need to be
spoken by the dysarthric patient, (b) four different speaker independent
intelligibility assessment systems which require the patient to speak a small
number of words, and (c) the assessment score is close to the perceptual score
that the Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) can relate to. The need for small
number of utterances to be spoken by the patient and the score being relatable
to the SLP benefits both the dysarthric patient and the clinician from
usability perspective.
