SPEECH IMPROVEMENT TRIAL



We are a husband (Garry, software engineer) and wife (Sam, Speech & Language Therapist) team that create apps to help people with their communication needs.

As you may know, 2 of our apps are listed on the Parkinson’s UK website as they help people with voice and swallowing difficulties. https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/information-and-support/apps-and-devices-parkinsons). We recently won a regional award for outstanding achievement for our app work and were highly commended at a national level.

You will be pleased to hear that we have been successful in securing an innovate UK fast start grant to help people with Parkinson’s. It’s a 6-month project (running from October to April 2023) to develop a novel, innovative AI system to measure clarity of speech to drastically improve the effectiveness of affordable, self-driven voice therapy for people with Parkinson’s Disease.

This project is a small-scale study but, if successful will be a catapult to a much larger research project where we would like to collaborate with Parkinsons UK, research centres, Universities and of course people with Parkinsons themselves on a much more formal basis.

For this project, we will train an AI system to analyse and provide objective feedback on clarity of speech (something which currently isn’t possible). To do this, we need to gather a large sample of peoples voices.

We are currently gathering audio samples of people with (and without) dysarthria and would really like to have as many samples as possible. We would really appreciate it if members of your group and any other groups could support us with this collection. All data will be anonymous and used solely for this project.

If anyone is happy to support us with our project, then this is what we’d like them to do;

Please send a voice recording to sam@speechtools.co (you can use voice memos on your phone or any other audio recording that you use). Please let us know your age and gender.

  1. Say ‘ahhhh’ for as long as you can

  1. Say ‘eeee’ for as long as you can

  1. Count aloud 1-10

  1. Say aloud the days of the week

  1. Read the following 2 sentences ‘you wished to know all about my grandfather. Well he is nearly 93 years old’

  1. Use 2 or 3 sentences to describe what you can see around you today.

The recording should take approximately 1 minute to complete.

Thank you in advance,

Best wishes,

Sam

PS – please do contact me if you want to talk any of this through or ask questions.

Sam Brady

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Speech & Language Therapist

Email sam@speechtools.co