The project proposal for the personalized therapy of pre scholars suffering from speech impairments
targets the following objectives:
O1. initial and during therapy evaluation of volunteer
children and identification of a modality of standardizing their progresses and regresses (at the level of the physiological and behavioral parameters);O2.
rigorous formalization of an evaluation methodology and development of a pertinent database for the field; O3. the development of an expert system for the personalized therapy of
speech impairments that will allow for designing a training path for pronunciation, individualized according to the defect category, previous experience and the child's therapy previous evolution; O4. the development of a therapeutically guide that will allow mixing classical methods with the adjuvant procedures of the audio visual system and the design of a database that will
contain the set of exercises and the results obtained by the child O5. the design of a 3D virtual model for the phono-articulatory apparatus for the logopead's therapy sessions O6. the development of a mobile embedded device based on the System on Chip architecture for personalized speech therapy O7.
feedback according to the age and exercises that the child solves as well as to the results he obtains. O8. integration of the system for achieving the optimal child – logopaed interaction and
continuing the therapy sessions at the child's home O9. technological transfer and development of the commercial version of the product O10.
dissemination of the results consisting in 10 articles published in journals out of which 3 for ISI indexed journals
An important objective is represented by the visual interaction of the child with the system along his therapy sessions. For this reason, the 3D virtual simulator of the phono articulatory apparatus
offering the possibility for positioning the elements that play a role in phonation and for generating the associated sound, represents another important aspect of the project. Due to this model's complexity
[9, 10], its implementation won't be possible for the mobile device. Instead, it will run on the desktop PC from the logopaed's office. We estimate that, based on the accumulated knowledge
and experience, an e-learning type of application will be developed that will replace the mobile device for children and logopaeds for whom the acquisition of the equipment is not possible.
References [1] OLP (Ortho-Logo-Paedia) – Project for Speech Therapy http://www.xanthi.ilsp.gr/olp
[2] Diagnostic evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (http://www.harcourt-uk.com/product.aspx?n=1344&s=1376&cat=1388&skey=2183)
[3] STAR Speech Training, Assessment, and Remediation http://www.asel.udel.edu/speech
[4] Speechviewer III -
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/edmark/prod/sv3/default.htm
[5] Laboissière, R., Ostry, D.J., and Feldman, A.G. (1996). The control of
multi-muscle systems: Human jaw and hyoid movements. Biological Cybernetics, 74, 373-384
[6] Kiritani, S., Itoh, S. K., & Fujimura, O. (1975). Tongue-pellet tracking by a computer controlled X-ray
microbeam system. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 57, 1516-1520
[7] Sanguineti, V., Laboissière, R., & Payan, Y. (1997). A control model of human tongue movements in speech. Biological
Cybernetics, 77(1), 11-22.
[8] Honda, K., Hirai, H., & Dang, J. (1994). A physiological model of speech production and the implication of tongue-larynx interaction. In International Congress on Spoken
Language Processing, Yokohama, Japan, 175-178
[9] Dang, Jianwu / Honda, Kiyoshi (2003), Consideration of muscle co-contraction in a physiological articulatory model, In EUROSPEECH-2003, pp. 2361-2364
Olov Engwall (2001), Modeling the talking tongue, Lund University, Dept. of Lingusitics, Working Papers 49, pp. 30-33 |
