Architecture of an automated therapy tool for childhood apraxia of speech

Authors:
Avinash Parnandi;Virendra Karappa;Youngpyo Son;Mostafa Shahin;Jacqueline McKechnie;Kirrie Ballard;Beena Ahmed;Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
Affiliations:
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX;Texas A&M University, Doha, Qatar;The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia;The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia;Texas A&M University, Doha, Qatar;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Venue:
Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
Year:
2013

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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.