Doctoral student Ming Hsu works with Quentin Travers, 12, in the Purdue University Speech-Language Clinic. Quentin uses the iPad SPEAKall! app to ask for the items on the plate. Photo: Purdue University photo/Mark Simons |
Students in a Purdue
University
service-learning program have developed an application for Apple’s iPad that
helps children with severe autism learn how to communicate.
The app, called SPEAKall!, allows the children to construct sentences by
choosing photos and graphic symbols. The app speaks the sentence, which allows
a child to communicate a thought and also helps the child learn to talk.
Launched in November on iTunes, the free app has been downloaded almost
3,300 times.
With the app, a child could take an iPad into a fast-food restaurant,
construct a sentence saying “I want a cheeseburger,” then play it for
the order-taker. Hearing how the sentence sounds also can help the child
develop his or her own speech and language skills.
“Fifty percent of children with severe autism are non-verbal, meaning
they don’t develop speech or language skills needed to communicate,” said
Oliver Wendt, an assistant professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences
who worked with the students developing the app and is testing it. “One
strategy to get the children started with functional communication is a
low-technology approach where they learn to pick up a graphic symbol card and
exchange it for a desired item. The last couple of years, we have been looking at
how to move children on to more sophisticated solutions, such as
speech-generating devices that facilitate natural speech and language
development.”
That’s where the SPEAKall! app comes in.
“One cool thing is that you can record a voice and add whatever pictures
you want,” said Nick Schuetz, a senior in electrical and computer
engineering from Loogootee,
Ind., who led the EPICS service
learning student group. “The child could combine his mother’s voice and
his father’s picture to say ‘I want dad home.'”
Wendt said the best results are often seen with children 9 to 12 years old.
Younger children can learn to use the app, but problem behaviors or sensory
issues may interfere. “With the older children, these issues are more
under control, and the brain is still developing and has capacity to
learn.”
The app has been effective in improving practical, everyday communication in
tests with children with autism through Greater Lafayette Area Special Services
(GLASS), which serves children with special needs in the Lafayette,
West Lafayette, and Tippecanoe County, Ind.,
school corporations.
Tracy Holdman, a special education teacher in the West Lafayette School
Corp., has two students who use the app on classroom iPads.
“As a teacher, I’m always looking for a means of communication for my
students. A large percentage of students I have taught over the last 13 years
have unintelligible speech, a communication disorder or are non-verbal,”
Holdman said. “SPEAKall! not only gives the students a voice, but allows
them to communicate their wants and needs. This helps them become more
independent.
“Because we are now seeing iPads everywhere we go, students with
disabilities can blend into the community in a more socially acceptable
manner.”
Mary Ann Harrison’s 12-year-old grandson is one of the students Wendt is
working with on the app. Each week he has therapy on SPEAKall! in the Purdue
Speech-Language Clinic, in his Tippecanoe School Corp. middle school classroom
and at home.
“He’s certainly getting it,” Harrison
said. She said he recently learned to use the “I want” icon on the
app to form sentences.
“I’m really excited about the possibilities,” she said.
Student clinicians in Purdue’s speech-language pathology program have tested
the app on children with Down syndrome. Because they have fine motor control
difficulties, the app was tweaked to ease use of the drag and drop feature for
constructing sentences.
Children with Down syndrome also can have more severe speech and language
difficulties, although it’s often just a problem of delayed development, Wendt
said.
“In autism, speech and language are much more severely disordered and
often completely absent. They frequently don’t understand the function of
communication in general,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says autism affects as many
as 1 in every 88 children in the United States.
Wendt’s research is sponsored by the Indiana Clinical and Translational
Science Institute, a statewide project involving Purdue, Indiana
University, and the University of Notre Dame and funded by the National
Institutes of Health.
The Purdue students were working through EPICS, a service-learning program
through which students work with local partners for community improvement.
Schuetz said about 15 students worked on the app over two years. They came
from a variety of disciplines, including computer science; electrical and
computer engineering; management; industrial design; and speech, language, and
hearing sciences.
EPICS creates teams of undergraduates who earn academic credit for
multiyear, multidisciplinary projects that solve engineering- and
technology-based problems for community service and educational organizations.
The program, founded at Purdue in 1995, is now in colleges and high schools
throughout the United States
and globally.