Assistive gamification and speech recognition E-tutor system for speech impaired students

Abstract

In a single school year, 5,857 young Filipino students have been found to suffer from evident speech or language impairments. The Philippines has this number of children, all of whom experience a great disadvantage in learning and communication, both of which are crucial and very much needed. Speech impairment does not necessarily mean that the person cannot speak but rather finding it difficult to do so. It is a condition that can affect the academic performance of a child because of the difficulty in communicating by stuttering and such. The deaf or the hard-of-hearing (HoH) also sometimes develop this kind of impairment due to development issues. This paper concentrates on the design of a Gamified E-Tutor System that utilizes speech recognition in teaching Statistics to senior high school students with speech impairment with the help of Filipino Sign Language (FSL). The said components (gamification/speech recognition) were integrated into the system to improve the learning engagement of students with speech impairment and supplement the speech therapies they go through. By integrating gamification elements with learning strategies for students with disabilities, a speech therapist can use this system to supplement their sessions and monitor their status, as well as their progress. Through this E-Learning system, information regarding gamification elements may be extracted to help determine the most effective learning components for students with speech impairment.