Phonological disorders in children? Design and user experience evaluation of a mobile serious game approach

This paper presents the concept and the user evaluation study of the first Super-Fon’s prototype, which is a mobile health app with a serious game approach for Android Tablets. It was developed with the main goal of working as a complement to the therapeutic intervention in phonological disorders in children between 3 and 8 years old. The app comprises a range of activities, grouped into levels, presenting a therapeutic intervention that follows the Metaphon methodology. The serious game dimension was added to better engage children in its use. The paper presents a user study conducted with two groups of children, without and with the phonological disorders. The first one worked as a control group to better help finding out if the prototype is well designed and provides a positive user experience to be well received by the children, engaging them, despite their condition. The results of the study were very positive and promising.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Children with phonological problems: a survey of clinical practice

Background: Children with phonological problems are a significant proportion of many therapists' caseloads. However, little is known about current clinical practice with these children or whether research on the effects of therapy have influenced this practice. Aims: To investigate the methods of assessment and remediation used by therapists working in the UK. Methods & Procedures: A questionnaire was sent to therapists working with pre- and primary school-aged children. Outcomes & Results: Ninety-eight clinicians of varying experience responded. Most used the South Tyneside Assessment of Phonology to assess children, were confident in choosing therapy, and were aware of evidence that therapy is beneficial. They used a variety of therapies. Auditory discrimination, minimal contrast therapy, and phonological awareness were popular and often used in combination. Most involved parents. In planning therapy, clinicians were more influenced by children's language and cognitive abilities and the motivation of parents than by the nature of the impairment. Conclusions: Constraints upon clinicians make it difficult for them to convert research findings to practice. In particular, assessments that allow more individualized and targeted interventions appear little used. Clinicians are aware of research but there is a danger that clinical practice and research are diverging

Three different phonological approaches moving one child towards intelligible speech

Includes bibliographical references.For my Capstone, I will research, contrast, and then apply three different phonological approaches to therapy to the same four year old female with unintelligible speech. The three different phonological approaches are multiple oppositions, phonemic categories development, and construct of complexity. Each phonological approach has different targets to therapy but all have the same ultimate goal of intelligible speech. Multiple oppositions use multiple sound pairs to help the child reduce homonomy and integrate their knowledge of sound sets. Facilitating underlying phonemic category uses complete emersion of phonemic sounds though training and assessments in hope that the mass quantity of input will aid in the correction of the child's phonological disorder. Construct of complexity uses complex target clusters in therapy in hopes that the complexity of the targets will allow the mastery of simpler tasks.B.S. (Bachelor of Science

Identification of phonological processes in preschool children's single-word productions

Speech and language therapists (SLTs) often refer to phonological data norms as part of their assessment protocols in evaluating the communication skills of the pre-school child. There is a variety of norms available and although broadly similar, differences are embedded within their definitions of mastery of the adult target system. Presence of velar fronting, stopping of affricates and [s] reduction in the dataset was found to mirror previous research. However, there was a lower than expected incidence by age groups of palato-alveolar fronting, stopping of fricatives and obstruent cluster reduction

Mobile Apps to improve therapy: the health practitioner in your pocket knows you

Comunicação apresentada no 15th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia (MoMM2017), 04-06 December 2017, Salzburg, AustriaThere 1 is an emerging consumer-driven demand for a more personalised health system and, there is no question, the rapid evolution of the mobile apps market became an important driver for personalisation in the health field. The MAiThE (Mobile Apps to improve ThErapy) project focuses on the deployment and study of personalised mHealth apps to provide patients and carers with self-management capabilities to help them feel empowered in their ability to find strategies in a more informed and collaborative way, and to optimise therapy outside the clinical context, with remote support from health practitioners. The insight gathered with the development and assessment of the apps tailored to the end-users’ needs will result in a conceptual model to guide in the development of future mHealth apps. The project will produce an impact study based on thorough apps evaluations conducted on the field with participants from different contexts.N/

Mobile Apps to improve ThErapy

There is an emerging consumer-driven demand for a more personalised health system and, there is no question, the rapid evolution of the mobile apps market became an important driver for personalisation in the health field. The MAiThE (Mobile Apps to improve ThErapy) project focuses on the deployment and study of personalised mHealth apps to provide patients and carers with self-management capabilities to help them feel empowered in their ability to find strategies in a more informed and collaborative way, and to optimise therapy outside the clinical context, with remote support from health practitioners. The insight gathered with the development and assessment of the apps tailored to the end-users’ needs will result in a conceptual model to guide in the development of future mHealth apps. The project will produce an impact study based on thorough apps evaluations conducted on the field with participants from different contexts.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Learnability Project Working Paper: Experimental Designs and Protocols

This working paper outlines, in part, some general principles of single-subject experimental design and summarizes some core elements of the treatment and generalization protocols used in Learnability Project research. It is the companion to the Experimental Archive of the DATA collection of the Gierut / Learnability Project.National Institutes of Health DC00433, RR7031KK, DC00076, DC001694 (PI: Gierut

ChilDiBu – A Mobile Application for Bulgarian Children with Special Educational Needs

Designing applications adapted to the capabilities of each user is an important part of modern software engineering. Children with Autism spectrum disorder and/or intellectual disabilities are a special group of users where standard application design is not a good approach. Some of them have speech disorders; others have disorders of the musculoskeletal system and in their cognitive development. In the literature, these children are referred to as children with special educational needs. Only a few researchers are involved in the development of various computer technologies, including mobile applications appropriate for these children. Some specialized mobile applications for these users can be found in the different mobile stores. However, most of these apps are rather expensive or with inappropriate user interfaces. Another disadvantage in all the apps is the lack of support in the Bulgarian language. It makes them unusable for the youngest users with special needs in Bulgaria. A conceptual model based on the investigation of some existing applications, the well-established theoretical practices, and on the opinion of children without disorders is proposed in this paper. An approach to designing and developing the interactive mobile application ChilDiBu for children with special needs, suitable for the Windows Phone mobile operating system, is presented. ChilDiBu is a picture-based app that combines graphic images, texts and audio files which can be used to learn the Bulgarian alphabet, the numbers up to 20, some basic colors and the daily activities that children perform. The application is focused on the development of the fine motor skills, observation and decision-making skills which is completed with a puzzle for arranging the two-digit numbers. At the end of the paper the app interface, the way it is used and its app architecture are shown

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING COMMUNICATION-CENTERED INTERVENTION TO FACILITATE PHONOLOGICAL LEARNING IN YOUNG CHILDREN

A phonological disorder is a communication disorder of the speech sound system characterized by an impaired ability to use developmentally expected speech sounds and sound patterns to communicate with others (Bauman-Waengler, 2004). This impairment affects the clarity of a child\u27s speech and how easily a child\u27s speech can be understood. As stated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), difficulties with speech sound production may interfere with academic achievement, social communication, or future occupational achievement. Children with phonological impairments are generally viewed as being at risk for reading difficulties (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2001).Clinicians and researchers in speech-language pathology agree that efficient treatment of children who have moderate to severe phonological disorders is critical. Although imitation and structured practice are primary strategies employed by speech- language pathologists for practicing speech production, using communicative tasks to facilitate generalization during phonological intervention has been suggested in the literature.The purpose of this study was to determine if communication-centered phonological intervention would be effective in improving speech production in preschool children with moderate to severe phonological disorders. A single subject multiple probe across subjects research design (Horner andamp; Baer, 1978) was used to assess the effectiveness of communication-centered phonological intervention with three preschool children. The communication-centered phonological intervention in this investigation consisted of the combined application of focused stimulation of key words during joint storybook reading and interactive practice of key words using communicative feedback.All three subjects demonstrated some type of phonological improvement following the communication-centered intervention. Two out of the three subjects demonstrated improvement in the use of the target phonological patterns during theintervention sessions with one of these participants demonstrating generalization of the target phonological pattern to conversational speech. Although the third subject did not demonstrate improvement during the intervention period, follow-up testing revealed some system-wide changes in his phonology that may be attributed to the intervention. Further investigation of communication-centered phonological intervention is warranted

Child Phonology: Dynamic Assessment of Speech Adaptability

Speech-language pathologists help children with speech sound disorders learn to say sounds like their peers. The purpose of this study is to determine how a child’s speech changes during treatment when given help. Traditionally, speech-language pathologists have only measured children’s speech sound production using assessments that provide no help. Our study is one of the first to evaluate a new assessment that measures the amount of help needed for children to be successful in producing speech sounds. We evaluated a single participant: a six-year, two-month old boy who had difficulties saying many sounds, which often were made as “t” or “d”. We assessed his progress on four sounds that he practiced over eight sessions. Sounds were selected because they were the most difficult sounds for him to say. The participant’s progress was recorded using the Glaspey Dynamic Assessment of Phonology (GDAP). We evaluated his average GDAP score for all sounds before and after treatment. We also evaluated his individual GDAP scores for each of the four hard sounds targeted during treatment. To gain additional information about his progress over time, we compared his GDAP scores to his pre- and post-treatment static probe scores, an assessment in which he received no help. Our study is significant as current treatment and assessment approaches for children with speech sound disorders do not address a child’s improved, aided performance. As such, traditional assessments are unable to provide information about a child’s specific needs. However, assessments that do provide help, take into account the child’s needs in order to attain correct production. Results from our research may provide implications for treatment target selection related to the amount of progress made toward hard sounds