Development and pilot test for stuttering self-monitoring solution using telehealth

Abstract

Generalization of treatment is a challenging task for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and people who stutter (PWS), and it can contribute a barrier to long-term treatment success. Due to the limited resources on supporting the work of SLP, the time interval between two in-clinical treatment sessions for each PWS is very long which affects the efficiency of long-term treatment. To address this problem, we propose a stuttering self-monitoring solution using telehealth technology. A new mobile app known as the SpeakMorev2 is developed to allow PWS to rate their stuttering severity and anxiety levels in their daily living environment. For data storage, we use Database as a Service (DBaaS) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to get the inherent characteristics of cloud computing such as scalability and ubiquity. Ten speech situations are listed in this app and participants are asked to rate their anxiety and stuttering severity levels before-and-after completing each speech task. We illustrate the feasibility of providing PWS with the independence to identify their anxiety level and stuttering severity within different speaking conditions. We collect the data from all SLP and PWS in the pilot study, and present the collected data from two case studies. We demonstrate our proposed stuttering self-monitoring solution can provide a cost-effective, home-based, beyond-clinic measurement which can make long-term treatment more effective.