This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an affordable stutter treatment device to prevent relapse following therapy. No solution today can administer the benefits of clinical therapy in real-world situations. Altered auditory feedback (AAF) devices are the only solution available outside of clinics; but they are detached from clinical therapy. These devices suffer from four major problems: (1) prohibitively high cost of AAF devices; (2) fixed parameters that work only for one therapy technique; (3) cannot record user's voice in real world situations for analysis by a speech therapist; (4) inability to segment the user's voice from background noise. The intellectual merits of the proposed approach are that a solution is available through which clinical therapy can be administered in real-world situations, running on widely-available Bluetooth headsets thus dramatically reducing cost and bringing solution within reach of everyone. The algorithms will allow the technology to be used for clinical therapy and will also provide metronome capabilities.
Stuttering is the most prevalent fluency disorder; more than three million suffer in America. AAF devices do not always provide long term improvement, are tested only in clinics and shown to help only one third of the people who use them. Clinical therapy is the only solution for long term improvement, but no device can provide it in real-world situations, today. The proposal aims to assist patients; through a solution that is designed specifically to aid in real-life environments and can be used with any clinical therapy technique. It has the potential to play a critical role in mitigating the documented problems. The primary market consists of those who stutter. The market also includes speech therapists that can use this solution to administer their therapy techniques, for more efficient and sustained long term improvement in stutter. If successful, the societal impact of this project could be significant; as there are currently no known affordable treatment devices to address stuttering.
Roughly 3 million Americans stutter, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Its impact on quality of life can be serious—studies show 8 out of 10 children who stutter have been bullied or teased, and 40 percent of adults have been denied a job or promotion because of their stuttering. The movie "King’s Speech" reigned at Oscars this year giving person who stutter (PWS) a public voice. As shown in the movie, having one’s speech-language pathologist (SLP) sitting with you full time is indeed a royal luxury. Then and now, most treatment takes place in the therapist’s clinic, away from the everyday challenges that a PWS encounters. That, SLP's say, makes tailoring treatment to their clients’ real-life experiences an educated guess. Clinical therapy is the primary treatment for stuttering for long term improvement, but no device can provide it in real-world situations, today. SLP’s feel handicapped by not having such a solution as they know; treating stutter in a clinical setting is completely different from treating stutter in real life. But what if every PWS could have a SLP with them all the time? With the aid of a NSF Phase I award, our team at AventuSoft worked on exactly that, except our technology sticks in the ear. Our group of engineers and SLP's is working on software programs to adapt the common Bluetooth gadget and mobile phone to create an on-the-go device that records a PWS’s speech in the real world to deliver stuttering therapy outside of a clinic. The data is analyzed back later during treatment sessions in the SLP’s clinic, or even called in at near real time. For the first time speech-analysis techniques using real-world data have been applied to deliver speech therapy outside the clinic. Our objective is to develop a system that lets the SLP's monitor their client’s real-life performance, which will lead to significantly more effective treatment. The system also provides PWS the ability to maintain and improve their speech fluency using accepted therapy approaches. During Phase I, AventuSoft LLC successfully designed a prototype and demonstrated technical feasibility of a new affordable stutter treatment system, called FluenSoft. A commercialization strategy was also developed. Phase I identified multiple technical challenges in developing this advance FluenSoft device. Optimizations, design changes, user trials, and enhancements in the critical components of speech processing, hardware and software implementation have also been identified. With NSF SBIR Phase II funding, AventuSoft LLC will fully develop the FluenSoft technology that, mimics the expert human performance levels of fluency specialist SLP's. To create a solution that a non-clinician like a PWS can use outside of a clinic to achieve their goal of naturalness and maintain fluency. At the completion of the Phase II, FluenSoft will be ready for commercial use. This project has very high commercial potential as it mitigates the well-documented stuttering problems, and is seen by the industry as both transformative and with high societal impact.
