staRt: Enhancing speech treatment with smartphone-delivered biofeedback

Project Summary Abstract Children with speech sound disorder show diminished accuracy and intelligibility in spoken communication and may thus be perceived as less capable or intelligent than peerseven when they are of average or above average intellectual abilityWhile most speech errors resolve by the late school age yearsup toof individuals will continue to exhibit residual speech errorsRSEthroughout the lifespanThese errors can limit participation in academic and social settingswith negative consequences for both socioemotional wellness and socioeconomic outcomesRSE is known to be particularly challenging to treatwith the result that speech language pathologistsSLPsoften discharge these clients with their errors uncorrectedBoth affected children families and speech language pathologistsSLPshave highlighted the critical need for research to identify and disseminate more effective forms of treatment for children with RSENew technologies have the potential to revolutionize both the development and delivery of interventions for speech disordersbut this possibility has seen very little systematic investigation to datePrevious lab based researchincluding work by the PIhas documented the ef cacy of speech treatment incorporating visual acoustic biofeedbackin which a client views a computer generated image of the acoustic signal of his her speech and attempts to match a model representing correct productionHowevertranslation of this research to clinical practice is limited at present by the cost of the technologyAt the same timethere is a need for well powered group studies to strengthen the evidence base supporting the ef cacy of biofeedbackbut largescale speech treatment research is prohibitively expensive under current modelsThe long term goal of this project is to address these clinical and research needs simultaneouslyWe propose to develop aexible mobile application that will make an evidence based biofeedback treatment program widely available to clinicians and patients parentsand will also enable large scale tests of hypotheses about intervention ef cacy through distributed delivery of treatment following standardized protocolsWe anticipate that by increasing access to biofeedback intervention while also strengthening the evidence base in support of this methodthis project will greatly expand the number of clinicians adopting biofeedback and thus multiply the public health impact of this important line of clinical research Project narrative In speech sound disorderde cits in spoken communication pose a barrier to academic and social participation whose impact may be lifelongNew technologies have the potential to revolutionize both development and delivery of interventions for speech disordersbut there has been very little systematic investigation of this possibility to dateThe goal of this proposal is to develop aexible mobile application that will make an evidence based biofeedback speech treatment program readily available to clinicians and patients parentsand will also enable large scale tests of hypotheses about intervention ef cacy through distributed delivery of treatment following standardized protocols