Mobile Speech Therapy Application Using Speech Processing for Intellectually Disabled Children

Introduction: Smart phones and mobile devices are among the most important inventions of modern technology. Their physical and potential capabilities offer a wide variety of opportunities to software programmers for developing new applications. Of these applications, educational games can efficiently promote the learning goals. The speech therapy applications are educational games which can be more effective if they use interactive games running on mobile devices.Materials and Methods: In this research, a mobile speech therapy application is designed to help children with Down Syndrome (DS) to improve their speaking skills. The application helps the children memorize the words and checks their pronunciation with an offline speech processing algorithm. The speech therapy application was tested on 5 children with different severity of DS. The application was assessed from two aspects of ease of use and efficiency by a Likert-type 5 item questionnaire under supervision of an expert. Also paired samples t test was performed to compare the efficiency of mobile application with the traditional speech therapy methods.Results: According to the paired samples t test results, the decision measure was 0.020 (less than 0.05), which shows that mobile application of speech therapy prefers to the traditional method. Conclusion: The results show that the application is effective and easy enough for children with Down Syndrome to use. Also the comparing assessment with the traditional teaching method show that using mobile application as a means of education will improve learning efficiency.