View clinical trials related to Dysarthria.
Filter by:The goal of this study is to improve our understanding of speech production, and to translate this into medical devices called intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) that will enable people who have lost the ability to speak fluently to communicate via a computer just by trying to speak.
This clinical trial aims to determine if a new smartphone-based speech therapy is effective self-treatment method for patients with post-stroke dysarthria. For this study, participants in the intervention group will use the speech therapy app for 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, over a 4-week period. The active control group will receive home-based speech therapy with the same duration and frequency as the intervention group. The study will help us understand if smartphone-based speech therapy is a viable treatment option for post-stroke dysarthria patients.
This clinical trial aims to determine if a new smartphone-based speech therapy is effective and feasible for patients with post-stroke dysarthria. Participants in the intervention group will use the speech therapy app for 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, over a 4-week period. The control group will receive the same duration and frequency of traditional speech therapy as the intervention group. The study will help us understand if smartphone-based speech therapy is a viable treatment option for post-stroke dysarthria patients.
Dysarthria is a speech disorder resulting in speech that is slow, slurred and difficult to understand, limiting a person's opportunities to study, work, and develop relationships. People with dysarthria often use communication aids to help them to communicate creating spoken messages using a keyboard, touchscreen or joystick. Communication aids can increase independence but are often too slow to keep pace with normal conversation. Developments in speech recognition technology have led to apps which can learn to recognise a set of words or sounds spoken by the individual with dysarthria, and connect these with a clear spoken output. The investigator's previous research provides some evidence that these voice input communication apps may be faster than traditional communication aids. This study aims to find out who can benefit from this technology, and what support they will need to use it successfully. This information can be used by professionals involved in providing communication aids, and will help the investigators to plan further research into their effectiveness. This research has two phases: 1. 20-30 individuals with dysarthria will be asked to use a voice input communication app for 6 months. The investigator's will collect information on whether VocaTempo improves their communication, and helps participants to reach their goals. 2. Focus groups will be held with professionals involved in providing and supporting people with communication aids, to understand factors affecting their ability to provide the support identified as needed in part 1 of the research. The investigators have a panel of communication aid users, who are advising and contributing throughout the study, for example, helping the investigators to identify informal support networks to recruit participants from. The investigators will let people know about the findings through support groups used by people with dysarthria, publications read by people involved in providing communication aids, and academic papers and conferences.
Articulatory deficits are present in most speakers with dysarthria, which negatively impacts their speech intelligibility, yet little is known about the relationship between articulatory movement and speech intelligibility. This study will examine the relationship between articulation measures, both acoustic and kinematic, and their relationship to perceptual measures (i.e., speech intelligibility and articulation ratings) in 30 individuals with dysarthria secondary to Parkinson's disease and 30 neurologically healthy adults of the same age. The findings will have implications for behavioral management.
Difficulties with speech and language are the first and most notable symptoms of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). While there is evidence that demonstrates positive effects of speech-language treatment for individuals with PPA who only speak one language (monolinguals), there is a significant need for investigating the effects of treatment that is optimized for bilingual speakers with PPA. This stage 2 efficacy clinical trial seeks to establish the effects of culturally and linguistically tailored speech-language interventions administered to bilingual individuals with PPA. The overall aim of the intervention component of this study is to establish the relationships between the bilingual experience (e.g., how often each language is used, how "strong" each language is) and treatment response of bilinguals with PPA. Specifically, the investigators will evaluate the benefits of tailored speech-language intervention administered in both languages to bilingual individuals with PPA (60 individuals will be recruited). The investigators will conduct an assessment before treatment, after treatment and at two follow-ups (6 and 12-months post-treatment) in both languages. When possible, a structural scan of the brain (magnetic resonance image) will be collected before treatment in order to identify if brain regions implicated in bilingualism are associated with response to treatment. In addition to the intervention described herein, 30 bilingual individuals with PPA will be recruited to complete behavioral cognitive-linguistic testing and will not receive intervention. Results will provide important knowledge about the neural mechanisms of language re-learning and will address how specific characteristics of bilingualism influence cognitive reserve and linguistic resilience in PPA.
The purpose of this study is to obtain preliminary device safety information and demonstrate proof of principle (feasibility) of the ability of people with tetraplegia to control a computer cursor and other assistive devices with their thoughts.
The proposed study aimed to determine if tDCS can help post-stroke patients with dysarthria.
Parkinson's disease (PD) patients treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) have unpredictable and varied speech outcomes after this treatment. Our research will prospectively document speech performance before, during and 6- and 12-months after STN-DBS in 80 surgically treated patients and compared with 40 non-surgical controls with Parkinson's disease. This study will provide unique insights into the role of STN in speech production, document speech outcome in a comprehensive fashion, identify factors that predict functional communication ability 12 months after STN-DBS, and test the feasibility of low frequency DBS in reversing DBS-induced speech declines in order to optimize treatment strategies for those living with Parkinson's disease.
Dysarthria and hearing loss are communication disorders that can substantially reduce intelligibility of speech and the addition of background noise adds a further challenge. This proposal utilizes an established signal processing technique, currently exploited for improved understanding of speech in noise for listeners with hearing loss, to investigate its potential application to overcome speech-in-noise difficulties for listeners understanding dysarthric speech. Successful completion of this project will demonstrate proof-of-concept for the application of this signal processing technique to dysarthric speech in noise, and inform the development of an R01 proposal to perform a large-scale evaluation of the technology, and clinically meaningful implications, in a broad range of disordered speech types and severities.