On-demand individualised digital therapy for children, teenagers and adults who stammer: product development and research studies

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**Need**Stammering (or stuttering in US English) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, like dyslexia or autism, that starts in childhood and becomes chronic around 12 years of age. It affects 8% of children and 2% of teenagers and adults (BSA, 2022).**The main unmet needs are:*** No cost-effective ongoing/long-term (chronic) support: need for cost-effective support to self-manage chronic stammering (Ward, 2018).* No recognized "best practices" or "gold standard" exists for stammering treatment (Baxter et al., 2016),* Expensive therapy and lack of stammering speech therapy provision and training (Bercow, 2018).**Product Vision**Respira, a UK-based SME, has built a digital therapeutic platform called BeneTalk that can tackle all the above-mentioned unmet needs and address societal inequalities, by building a speech therapy solution for stammering that is:1. Accessible to everyone (current development): on-demand support to self-manage chronic stammering without professional support intervention.2. Effective for everyone (this project): delivering a highly personalised digital speech therapy.**Project opportunity**Although there are no standard care options for stammering (i.e., no gold standard), the scientific community agrees that stammering treatment has to be highly individualised (Baxter 2016, Manning & DiLollo, 2017). It is therefore the motivation of this project to build a highly individualised therapy solution for PWS, enabling BeneTalk to be the first evidence-based Digital Therapeutics (DTx) solution for stammering.**Disruptive approach**A previous InnovateUK grant (Ref: 72343) enabled Respira to de-risk and build in-house expertise by developing BeneTalk. Top innovations vs existing technological solutions are:1\. Real-time Feedback: Visual, audio or haptic feedback in real-time to learn to modify speech patterns and behaviours.2\. Speech Tracking: Learning and practice at any speaking opportunity (outside the clinic or/and practice environment).3\. Use of machine learning to improve therapy outcomes: leveraging gathered data from a global user base (this project).4\. Community-Based Rehabilitation: Community speech practice & peer support.BeneTalk 2.0 was launched with premium features in the UK and U.S., and started generating revue with as a solution 5 to 10x cheaper and more effective than existing solutions.**Outputs**The primary objective of this project is to make further technical improvements into BeneTalk to make it more commercially viable, by integrating individualised therapy for all ages. The main project outputs are (within the "availability period"):1. Prototyping and testing individualised therapeutics solutions.2. Validating the new solution with patients, by improving the quality of life of the users and their families (particularly parents).