SMAAT Team Developing Speech Analysis Tool with Massive Potential
Every clinician aims to ensure they deliver the right intervention at the right time. A new tool being developed by a team at Curtin University will boost the capacity of Speech Pathologists to do just that.
The SMAAT Team has developed applications that will enable Speech Paths to record and assess the speech of children as young as 2 years old. The approach integrates objective measures into the assessment. The web-based or stand-alone application will improve the accuracy in diagnosing children with Speech Sound Disorders (SSD).
This team has been using the tool to record children saying a standard list of words and phrases for the clinician to then assess. These recordings can be easily reviewed and form part of a data bank to enable mapping of a ‘typical’ child’s speech sound and speech movement. The mapping is video facial tracking – a system that maps the face at key points and measures the movements of the face and facial muscles.
The data bank and mapping can then be compared to a recording of a child with a suspected Speech Sound Disorder providing the clinician with precise measures of difference. A fantastic bank of research data and some incredible technology.
But what does this all mean? Early intervention that is well-targeted will have a life-long positive impact. For the family, it means an enhanced capacity to communicate and understand each other, for the child it means evidence-based care is delivered before school age reducing the risk of an SSD causing problems with early learning, for clinicians it means improved accuracy of diagnoses and capacity to deliver interventions. It also has the potential to lower costs and increase the capacity for regional and remote families to receive this type of assessment.
The multi-disciplinary SMAAT team are understandably proud of their work and excited about its potential. This team has taken academic research and applied it in a real-world setting that has such enormous potential is one of the main reasons they so value being part of this team.
