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An Innovative and Game Changing Approach to Stuttering Intervention
$22.00
1.5 hours
Course Type: Video
Advances in technology have allowed speech-language pathologists and developers to address intervention approaches in new and exciting ways.
While it is common for people who stutter to receive services once or twice per week to address fluency goals, the accountability and motivation to practice beyond the clinic is often invisible. In this live presentation we will share ways we are addressing accountability and motivation to practice. We are presenting on how an artificial intelligence and speech-recognition-based video game can be used to motivate fluency practice in conjunction with and beyond the clinic.
Erich Reiter, is the CEO, Director & Co-Founder of Say It Labs. He holds a Masters in Computational Linguistics and a Masters in Communication Disorders. Erich brings 15 years of industry experience working as both a speech recognition scientist and speech and language pathologist.
The video game — Fluency Friends — has been in development for several years and is based on the Fluency Development System for Young Children
(Meyers and Woodford, 1992) which teaches motoric, prosodic, and cognitively-based fluency exercises specifically for young children. (Adults have been part of our study and with preliminary success as well). This therapy program is comprised of many techniques to help a person speak more fluently and sound more natural. It also contains elements of social discourse such as turn-taking and talking under pressure. The video game additionally incorporates mindfulness and breathing techniques to offer players learning opportunities on how to control anxiety and stress (Hardy, 2015), (Kuypers, 2011).
Early prototypes of the game were tested at a 1-week specialized camp for CWS and again in the home and clinic settings. Each prototype contained several speech-controlled mini-games focusing on rate of speech, pitch, amplitude, vocal-cord coordination.
The current version of Fluency Friends has evolved into a narrative-based video game that provides intrinsic motivation through gaming elements such as a relatable story for CWS — a quest to get their voice back —which includes many challenges and battles, collecting rewards and getting upgrades for voice use. There are many elements that are relevant to speech and language pathologists included in the game such as scaffolding, immediate feedback to players as they play the game, and automatic data-collection to track the progress of the player.
At the conference, we will report on our latest research using the video game. We have prepared a new research study on roughly 100 children who stutter and will soon start analyzing data. The goal of the investigation was to compare and contrast conventional treatment of hour of fluency therapy per week with a clinician, compared to one-hour weekly conventional therapy plus multiple weekly practice sessions with the video game. We will illustrate and discuss the results of the study by explaining how an artificial intelligence-based video game backed by speech recognition technology tuned specifically for people who stutter can motivate independent practice, promote speech motor skills, and prosody in children who stutter.
Subjects discussed are CWS who qualify as having moderate to severe stuttering in accordance with the SSI-4 (Riley and Bakker, 2009), without any other speech or language co-morbidities. Subjects have been assessed by fluency specialists and speech and language pathologists with expertise in fluency.
This presentation will include the measured effects of playing the game regularly for 3 months using user-reported outcome measures and acoustic and linguistic measurements that are relevant to the exercises in the video game.
