Speech therapy mobile application for speech and language impairment children

Abstract

Speech and language impairment (SLI) is a communication disorder when a person has difficulties to produce speech sounds correctly and understand others. Children with SLI need speech therapy to help them improve their communication skills in order to communicate effectively with others. Due to the lack of speech therapist in the state, children are mainly waste valuable learning time while waiting for therapy and these speech therapy sessions are usually done only on a one-to-one basis within a block period. Recent studies showed that mobile technologies may work as an educational tool which can help children to learn. Hence, a local prototype of mobile speech therapy application was developed to be appealing for pre-school children of age 3 to 6 with SLI and will be used as a supplementary activity which can be used during a speech therapy session or at home. In this paper, we present the results of a six months intervention experiment with SLI children. We have adapted the heuristic evaluation for evaluating the usability of the local prototype mobile speech therapy application. The results of our study shows those children and their parents gave positive responses towards the mobile application, also helps in improving the children skills in producing correct sounds.