Speech assist: An augmentative tool for practice in speech-language pathology

Dysarthria affects approximately 46 million people worldwide, with three million individuals residing in the US. Clinical intervention by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the United States is supplemented by high quality research, clinical expertise, and state of the art technology, supporting the overarching goal of improved communication. Unfortunately, many individuals do not have access to such care, leaving them with a persisting inability to communicate. Telemedicine, along with the growing use of mobile devices to augment clinical practice, provides the impetus for the development of remote, mobile applications to augment the work of SLPs. The proposed application will record speech samples and provide a variety of derived calculations, novel and traditional, to assess the integrity of speech production, including: vowel space area, assessment of an individual’s pathology fingerprint, and identification of which parameters of the intelligibility disorder are most disrupted (e.g., prosody, voc...