Towards designing speech technology based assistive interfaces for children's speech therapy
Revathy Nayar · 2017
Independent studies by the UK government in 2016 observed that speech sound disorders are the most prevalent condition amongst children. Lack of opportunities for individual practice and increasing caseload on speech therapists affect therapy outcomes. Assistive technological aids that process children’s speech and provide appropriate feedback can support therapy efficiency. Design of such aids are particularly demanding because they require speech recognition at phoneme level with high fidelity coupled with child friendly interfaces. Through this doctoral research we aim to design a mobile application using speech and touch as input modalities and thereby explore the technical challenges in adopting such tools in therapy. The design approach of this study is informed from the empirical field work on user requirements from children’s speech therapists. A stable, non-deviant phoneme recognition accuracy combined with the modeling of progress assessment used in actual clinical practices can feed into the design of a feedback based mobile game to be used to practice therapy exercises.