Design of Response Channels to Augment Speech and Language Rehabilitation in Children with Hearing Impairment

Hearing impairment impedes the normal development of speech and language skills in children. Lack of auditory stimulation restricts the ability of children to communicate using spoken language. Consequently, this hinders educational, social and career choices for children as they grow up. The standard of care for children with hearing impairment involves providing appropriate amplification devices (external/implanted) followed by speech and language therapy. The process of therapy is time and labor-intensive for all stakeholders. Regular compliance to therapy requires considerable time commitment by the parent/caretaker, which further implies a cost burden pertaining to therapy sessions and/or loss of wages. These challenges are compounded by the dearth, and a skewed distribution of qualified speech therapists in resource-constrained settings. An affordable intervention was proposed in our earlier work, wherein a smartphone application could facilitate home-based therapy for children with hearing impairment. Further discussions with stakeholders led to identification of other drawbacks in the current system of rehabilitation including lack of means to monitor and track the child’s progress during home-therapy. In this work, we propose the use of response channels to serve as quantitative metrics in analyzing and quantifying a child’s progress during the process of therapy. This technology-based solution may strengthen the support framework available for parents/caregivers to provide home-based therapy on a regular basis, and possibly reduce the need for frequent visits to the institution.