@inproceedings{hair2020chi,

title = {Preliminary Results From a Longitudinal Study of a Tablet-Based Speech Therapy Game},

author = {A Hair and C Markoulli and P Monroe and J McKechnie and K J Ballard and B Ahmed and R Gutierrez-Osuna},

url = {https://psi.engr.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/hair2020chi.pdf},

doi = {10.1145/3334480.3382886},

isbn = {978-1-4503-6819-3/20/04},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-04-25},

booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing},

publisher = {ACM},

abstract = {We previously developed a tablet-based speech therapy game called Apraxia World to address barriers to treatment and increase child motivation during therapy. In this study, we examined pronunciation improvements, child engagement over time, and caregiver evaluation performance while using our game. We recruited ten children to play Apraxia World at home during two four-week treatment blocks, separated by a two-week break; nine of ten have completed the protocol at time of writing. In the treatment blocks, children’s utterances were evaluated either by caregivers or an automated pronunciation framework. Preliminary analysis suggests that children made significant therapy gains with Apraxia World, even though caregivers evaluated pronunciation leniently. We also collected a corpus of child speech for offline examination. We will conduct additional analysis once all participants complete the protocol.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hair2019evaluating,

title = {Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition for Child Speech Therapy Applications},

author = {A Hair and K J Ballard and B Ahmed and R Gutierrez-Osuna},

url = {https://psi.engr.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/hair2019evaluating.pdf},

doi = {10.1145/3308561.3354606},

isbn = {978-1-4503-6676-2/19/10},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-10-28},

booktitle = {ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility},

organization = {ACM},

abstract = {Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology can be a useful tool in mobile apps for child speech therapy, empowering children to complete their practice with limited caregiver supervision. However, little is known about the feasibility of performing ASR on mobile devices, particularly when training data is limited. In this study, we investigated the performance of two low-resource ASR systems on disordered speech from children. We compared the open-source PocketSphinx (PS) recognizer using adapted acoustic models and a custom template-matching (TM) recognizer. TM and the adapted models significantly out-perform the default PS model. On average, maximum likelihood linear regression and maximum a posteriori adaptation increased PS accuracy from 59.4% to 63.8% and 80.0%, respectively, suggesting that the models successfully captured speaker-specific word production variations. TM reached a mean accuracy of 75.8%. },

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hair2018idc,

title = {Apraxia World: A Speech Therapy Game for Children with Speech Sound Disorders},

author = {A Hair and P Monroe and B Ahmed and K J Ballard and R Gutierrez-Osuna},

url = {https://psi.engr.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/hair2018idc.pdf},

doi = {10.1145/3202185.3202733},

isbn = {978-1-4503-5152-2/18/06},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-06-19},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Interaction Design and Children},

publisher = {ACM},

abstract = {This paper presents Apraxia World, a remote therapy tool for speech sound disorders that integrates speech exercises into an engaging platformer-style game. In Apraxia World, the player controls the avatar with virtual buttons/joystick, whereas speech input is associated with assets needed to advance from one level to the next. We tested performance and child preference of two strategies for delivering speech exercises: during each level, and after it. Most children indicated that doing exercises after completing each level was less disruptive and preferable to doing exercises scattered through the level. We also found that children liked having perceived control over the game (character appearance, exercise behavior). Our results indicate that (i) a familiar style of game successfully engages children, (ii) speech exercises function well when decoupled from game control, and (iii) children are willing to complete required speech exercises while playing a game they enjoy.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}