Empathy measures the capacity of the therapist to experience the same cognitive and emotional dispositions as the patient, and is a key quality factor in counseling. In this work we build computational models to infer the empathy of therapist using prosodic cues. We extract pitch, energy, jitter, shimmer and utterance duration from the speech signal, and normalize and quantize these features in...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the ability of a bedside swallowing assessment to reliably exclude aspiration following acute stroke. SUBJECTS Consecutive patients admitted within 24 h of stroke onset to two hospitals. METHODS A prospective study. Where possible, all patients had their ability to swallow assessed on the day of admission by both a doctor and a speech and language therapist using a ...

The best clinical assessment of swallowing following acute stroke, in order to decide whether to refer a patient to a speech and language therapist (SLT), is uncertain. Independently of the managing clinical team, we prospectively investigated 115 patients (51 male) with acute stroke, mean age 75 years (range 24-94) within 72 h of admission, using a questionnaire, structured examination and tim...

The speech therapist investigates all elementary functions in mouth breathers (swallowing, breathing, chewing and articulatory practice). Special interest is drawn to head and body postures in the set up of the craniofacial morphology.

BACKGROUND The appearance of the praxis disorder during the first years of development has been frequently designated as childhood apraxia of speech. The present theoretical perspectives direct the speech therapist to new tendencies regarding therapeutic intervention. AIM To present a bibliographic review of the last two years about childhood speech apraxia. CONCLUSION The present literatur...

Children with developmental disabilities such as childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) require repeated intervention sessions with a speech therapist, sometimes extending over several years. Technology-based therapy tools offer the potential to reduce the demanding workload of speech therapists as well as time and cost for families. In response to this need, we have developed “Tabby Talks,” a multi...

Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease, manifested by progressive muscular weakness and fatigue. There are frequent ocular and bulbar symptoms, among them, dysphonia. This article reports a case of dysphonia that contributed to the diagnosis of myasthenia gravis through a speech evaluation. The patient sought speech therapy with the ENT diagnosis of presbyphonia. The perceptual voice assess...

Intelligibility is generally accepted to be a very relevant measure in the assessment of pathological speech. In clinical practice, intelligibility is measured using one of the many existing perceptual tests. These tests usually have the drawback that they employ unnatural speech material (e.g. nonsense words) and that they cannot fully exclude errors due to the listener's bias. This raises the...

Empathy is considered a key curative aspect of interactive counseling based psychotherapy. In this present work, it is deemed an interpersonal behavior whereby one person communicates attention and understanding to another. The process of empathy involves “trying on” the thoughts or feelings of another person. Thus it is hypothesized to involve entrainment, wherein interlocutors become more ali...

Language disorders can be classified into the three linguistic levels of pronunciation, lexicon, and grammar. To identify the most important linguistic processes leading to disorders in the before-mentioned fields, both standardized test procedures and the analysis of freely spoken language are used in the everyday work of speech therapists. However, especially the analysis of freely spoken lan...