Architecture of an automated therapy tool for childhood apraxia of speech Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • We present a multi-tier system for the remote administration of speech therapy to children with apraxia of speech. The system uses a client-server architecture model and facilitates task-oriented remote therapeutic training in both in-home and clinical settings. Namely, the system allows a speech therapist to remotely assign speech production exercises to each child through a web interface, and the child to practice these exercises on a mobile device. The mobile app records the child's utterances and streams them to a back-end server for automated scoring by a speech-analysis engine. The therapist can then review the individual recordings and the automated scores through a web interface, provide feedback to the child, and adapt the training program as needed. We validated the system through a pilot study with children diagnosed with apraxia of speech, and their parents and speech therapists. Here we describe the overall client-server architecture, middleware tools used to build the system, the speech-analysis tools for automatic scoring of recorded utterances, and results from the pilot study. Our results support the feasibility of the system as a complement to traditional face-to-face therapy through the use of mobile tools and automated speech analysis algorithms.

name of conference

  • Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

published proceedings

  • Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

author list (cited authors)

  • Parnandi, A., Karappa, V., Son, Y., Shahin, M., McKechnie, J., Ballard, K., Ahmed, B., & Gutierrez-Osuna, R.

citation count

  • 19

complete list of authors

  • Parnandi, Avinash||Karappa, Virendra||Son, Youngpyo||Shahin, Mostafa||McKechnie, Jacqueline||Ballard, Kirrie||Ahmed, Beena||Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo

publication date

  • October 2013