STTR Phase I: An augmentative tool to connect speech language pathologists with patients

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project addresses the issue of communicative ability in individuals with neurogenic disorders. The inability to engage in spoken communication is among the most debilitating of all human conditions. Because treatment is behavioral and intensive, access to care and quality of care are significant issues. These are problems that disproportionately affect those in rural and underserved areas, leaving them with a persistent communication deficit. The clinical implications of the tools proposed here are considerable. The analytical approach summarized in this proposal should both improve the performance of individual speech and language pathologists while also enabling them to serve many more patients. Such a tool could be deployed to individuals with increased risk of Parkinson?s, Alzheimer?s, or other related neurological disorders that impact speech production. The proposed project addresses these issues through a tool that allows patients to remotely record speech and video samples and provides a variety of derived calculations, novel and traditional, to assess the integrity of speech. This approach provides access to expertise in rural areas with the goal of reducing health disparities in the field. The approach makes use of recent technical advances in the emerging field of personalized telemedicine, in conjunction with the increasingly widespread use of tablets in clinical practice, to remotely track abnormal speech production in at-risk individuals and augment human perceptual evaluation through modern data analytics. Realizing this vision requires the development of an advanced signal processing methodology and a suite of mobile applications that implements it in scalable fashion.