STTR Phase I: An augmentative tool to connect speech language pathologists with patients

这个小企业技术转让（STTR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力解决了神经源性疾病患者的沟通能力问题。无法进行口头交流是所有人类条件中最令人衰弱的。由于治疗是行为和密集的，获得护理和护理质量是重要的问题。这些问题对农村和服务不足地区的人影响特别大，使他们长期缺乏沟通。这里提出的工具的临床意义是相当大的。本建议中总结的分析方法应既提高个人的语音和语言病理学家的表现，同时也使他们能够为更多的患者提供服务。这样的工具可以部署到个人与帕金森病的风险增加？老年痴呆症？拟议的项目通过一种工具来解决这些问题，该工具允许患者远程记录语音和视频样本，并提供各种衍生计算，新颖和传统，以评估语音的完整性。这一方法为农村地区提供了获得专门知识的机会，目的是减少该领域的保健差距。该方法利用个性化远程医疗新兴领域的最新技术进步，结合平板电脑在临床实践中日益广泛的使用，远程跟踪高危人群的异常语音产生，并通过现代数据分析增强人类感知评估。实现这一愿景需要开发一种先进的信号处理方法和一套移动的应用程序，以可扩展的方式实现它。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project addresses the issue of communicative ability in individuals with neurogenic disorders. The inability to engage in spoken communication is among the most debilitating of all human conditions. Because treatment is behavioral and intensive, access to care and quality of care are significant issues. These are problems that disproportionately affect those in rural and underserved areas, leaving them with a persistent communication deficit. The clinical implications of the tools proposed here are considerable. The analytical approach summarized in this proposal should both improve the performance of individual speech and language pathologists while also enabling them to serve many more patients. Such a tool could be deployed to individuals with increased risk of Parkinson?s, Alzheimer?s, or other related neurological disorders that impact speech production.The proposed project addresses these issues through a tool that allows patients to remotely record speech and video samples and provides a variety of derived calculations, novel and traditional, to assess the integrity of speech. This approach provides access to expertise in rural areas with the goal of reducing health disparities in the field. The approach makes use of recent technical advances in the emerging field of personalized telemedicine, in conjunction with the increasingly widespread use of tablets in clinical practice, to remotely track abnormal speech production in at-risk individuals and augment human perceptual evaluation through modern data analytics. Realizing this vision requires the development of an advanced signal processing methodology and a suite of mobile applications that implements it in scalable fashion.