Technology-facilitated speech rehabilitation

Abstract

Oral communication is the dominating means of social interaction between humans. Hence, speech impairments could significantly impact an individual's career, mental health, and quality of life. Speech rehabilitation is a field that aims to address various speech impairments. Traditionally, speech rehabilitation is conducted by a trained clinician. In the United States, such clinicians are referred to as speech-language pathologists. To reduce the financial cost and to increase the convenience for the patients, various technologies have been adopted in speech rehabilitation, particularly mobile apps, which could enable a patient to practice alone at home. The main form of technology-facilitated speech rehabilitation is computer-based speech therapy.As shown in Figure 13.1, speech therapy typically adopts a variety of speech exercises to improve one or more specific target areas that could improve the patient's ability to properly speech as well as to understand the other person's speech, ranging from loudness, phonation, articulation, resonance, prosody, to oral muscles, social communication, and cognitive communication. There are a large number of disorders that could lead to speech impairments, including aphasia, dysarthria, apraxia of speech, dyslalia, hearing impairment, resonance disorders, fluency disorders, articulation disorders, expressive disorders, and cognitive-communication disorders. Due to the heterogeneity of the disorders, speech exercises could differ significantly.