Role of Therapeutic Devices in Enhancing Speech Intelligibility and Vocal Intensity in an Individual with Parkinson’s Disease

The prevailing speech therapy techniques for treating hypokinetic dysarthria in individuals with Parkinson\u27s disease (PD) yields improvements within the clinical setting, however, maintenance and generalization of acquired behaviors continue to be a challenge. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of portable therapeutic devices including Ambulatory Phonation Monitor with biofeedback (APM) and auditory masker in maintenance and carryover of improved speech. Our participant was an individual diagnosed with PD for the past 25 years who continued to display speech disturbances despite undergoing several behavioral speech therapy programs and neurosurgical procedures. Speech intelligibility and average intensity measures under automatic, elicited, and spontaneous speech tasks were recorded pre- and postusage of APM and auditory masker for a period of 1 week each. Preliminary findings showed no significant difference in the measures between means (P\u3e0.05) across all tasks for both the devices. Suggestions for future research on therapeutic devices are discussed

Modeling the Rocking and Sliding of Free-Standing Objects Using Rigid Body Dynamics

A rigid body dynamics algorithm is presented in this paper to simulate the interaction between two rigid bodies, a free-standing rigid object, and a pedestal that has infinite mass, in the presence of static and kinetic friction forces. Earlier algorithms led to different solutions for the contact forces when parameters external to problem description, such as the ordering of contact points, are changed. This paper addresses the issue of selecting an appropriate solution for the contact forces and impulses from the infinite set of solutions by picking the solution that is closest to the previous state of the rigid body. The capability of this algorithm in simulating pure rocking, pure sliding, and coupled rocking-sliding response modes of a rectangular block is validated using analytical/semianalytical results. This validated algorithm is later used to identify the various response modes of a rectangular block, which is given an initial tilt and then released