A SPEECH THERAPY GAME APPLICATION FOR APHASIA PATIENT NEUROREHABILITATION - A PILOT STUDY OF AN MHEALTH APP

摘要

A life without language as a system of communication is a life that cannot be lived to the fullest. Aphasia, a multimodal neurophysiologic disorder manifested by a substantial communication restriction due to brain damage, is one of the many possible causes that can make life language-less. Fortunately, it can be treated by speech therapy to rehabilitate language skills and can even be improved by therapy via an app to supplement communication experiences as proven by recent studies. As a contribution to the gaming rehabilitation industry, this paper aims: i) to design and develop a speech therapy game application, as an additional neurorehabilitation modality for aphasia patients, and ii) to assess its applicability as an adjunct to the traditional neuromuscular rehabilitation through a pilot study. Eight sessions of game-based speech therapy were applied to seven aphasic patients, 10-15 minutes per day, once a week, for 8 successive weeks. Aphasia assessment in stroke patients was performed with a multidimensional assessment tool, built-in to the therapeutic game, based from Quick Aphasia Battery (QAB) before and after treatment. The comparison of before and after treatment revealed an improvement in all of the QAB subtests: level of consciousness, connected speech, word comprehension, sentence comprehension, picture naming, repetition, reading aloud, and motor speech. This suggests that the development of this speech therapy game and the preliminary findings from the pilot study may indeed be an effective neurorehabilitation instrument for therapy of aphasia patients.