Evaluation And Extensions Of An Automatic Speech Therapy Platform

Speech and language technology is currently being incorporated into e-health services addressed to the detection, assessment and rehabilitation of different types of speech and language disorders. This is the case of the Portuguese platform VITHEA, which provides remote access to automatic training sessions for aphasia rehabilitation. In VITHEA, patients' answers to semantic confrontation exercises are validated using automatic speech recognition. Text-to-speech synthesis and a virtual agent are exploited to allow a natural multimodal interaction. While the effectiveness of the different technological components has been individually validated, there is a need for the assessment of the overall therapeutic platform. In this work, we report evaluation results of the complete therapeutic platform based on a survey collected from speech and language therapists. The results not only confirmed the significant usefulness of the platform for the treatment of aphasic patients, but also provided very relevant feedback that led to the introduction of additional features and to the development of similar solutions for other diseases.