Development of Speech Therapy Mobile Application for Speech Disorder Post-Stroke Patients

In Malaysia, stroke is the third cause of death and disability. Stroke cause significant injury to the brain that may result in long-term problems such as communication, concentration, memory, and executive functions. About one-third of post-stroke patients have speech and communication problems that require to undergo series of one-to-one speech therapy sessions. However, there are only 300 speech therapists in Malaysia which limit the recovery and may not reach to the needed patient. More importantly, frequent therapy conducted could fasten the recovery of the patients' speech. Therefore, this research develops a mobile application to be used as an alternative for speech therapy session. Although there are mobile applications for speech therapy, none of them are in Bahasa Melayu. The mobile application implements an automatic speech recognition technology that accepts the vowel speech sound from a post-stroke patient in Bahasa Melayu. The mobile application will process the sound, evaluate, and provide feedback score for the vowel sound in an accuracy percentage. It is expected that the ASR speech therapy mobile application could help speech disorder post-stroke patients to practice their speech ability at their own time without attending speech therapy sessions.