people with IDD follows speech therapy is their loss of motivation [8]. Speech therapy takes time to have noticeable effects. Most of the time, people with IDD don’t understand the goal of doing the exercises and going to speech therapy; it’s too abstract for them. Therefore, they lose their motivation. And without motivation, speech therapy is drastically less impactful.
From this realization, our team redefined the challenge to answer the following question:
How can we make speech therapy more accessible, more affordable and more motivating?
A session in speech therapy In average, people with IDD that have access to a speech therapy goes twice a week. A normal session in speech therapy includes warming-up, reviewing progress through exercises and a teaching part to learn new skills. The speech therapist acts as an evaluator, a motivator, a monitor and as a teacher. Through interviews with speech therapists, we realized that they were evaluating the success of their patient through the sound produced by them. And to demonstrate the correct way of doing the exercises they use their own face so the patient can imitate them and learn by seeing it done correctly.
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LASI - Hawking team