Abstract
Delivering aphasia therapy via telecommunication may provide a means to deliver intensive therapy in a cost-effective way. Teletherapy, remotely-administered (language) treatment, may support the repetitive drill practices that people with chronic aphasia need to perform when learning to compensate for their lasting language difficulties. The use of teletherapy may allow speech and language pathologists (SLPs) to focus in-person sessions more strongly on the generalisation of therapy effects to daily life. This single subject study is an investigation whether a teletherapy application called e-REST meets the criteria of accessibility, user-friendliness, as well as effectiveness. e-REST, the teletherapy version of the Dutch and adapted Reduced Syntax Therapy, teaches chronically aphasic speakers of Dutch who experience difficulties in sentence production to convey their messages in a kind of telegraphic style. The results obtained suggest that it is reasonable to conduct a larger study into the user-friendliness, accessibility, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of e-REST.
Highlights
Delivering aphasia therapy via telecommunication may provide a means to deliver intensive therapy in a cost-effective way
In this single-case intervention study, e-Reduced Syntax Therapy (REST) was administered following a protocolised training procedure (Ruiter, 2008) for a total of 22 hours over a period of 16 weeks to a Dutch-speaking adult with chronic expressive agrammatism (N = 1). Both before (T1) and after e-REST (T2), the effect of the intervention on grammatical output and functional communication was investigated with a Picture Description Task (PDT, to be described below), which is built into the eREST application and routinely administered in clinical practice as a clinimetric analysis of this intervention
The e-REST teletherapy application could be used independently for the greater part by JR once the speech and language pathologists (SLPs) had initialised the application on the computer, selected the therapy item with which to proceed, and made sure that the headset microphone worked properly
Summary
Delivering aphasia therapy via telecommunication may provide a means to deliver intensive therapy in a cost-effective way. The use of teletherapy may allow speech and language pathologists (SLPs) to focus in-person sessions more strongly on the generalisation of therapy effects to daily life. This single subject study is an investigation whether a teletherapy application called e-REST meets the criteria of accessibility, user-friendliness, as well as effectiveness. When resources are lacking to deliver highly intensive aphasia treatment in an in-person manner over a sufficient period of time, SLPs may be able to treat chronic aphasia both intensively and cost efficiently via information and communication technology (ICT), known as telerehabilitation (Beijer & Rietveld, 2015; Cherney & Van Vuuren, 2012; Code, 2012; Parmanto & Saptono, 2009; Rogante, Grigioni, Cordella, & Giacomozzi, 2010).
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