Robot-assisted care system for dyslalia designed by Computer Engineering researcher

Dyslalia causes the incorrect pronunciation of phonemes, and now Eldon Glen Caldwell, Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Alicante, has designed a care system to combat non-severe articulation disorders and dyslalia for patients needing low to medium complexity therapies.

The unique system is cost effective in that it combines a physical robot with a mobile device app that increases therapeutic effectiveness specifically in organic, physiological and functional dyslalia, so professionals can treat a patient remotely or in person and has already been tried and tested in a real-world setting. It has an integrated voice recognition, a robot archetype for the human-robot relationship and a full range of programming and control of the robot’s movements.

Eldon Glen Caldwell said: “Experimentally, it has been proved that using the platform and the mobile device application improves therapeutic effectiveness by up to 11.3% in 10 weeks, with a statistical reliability of 95%. From the fifth week of use onwards, statistically significant changes are observed in the groups using the technology without time restrictions. It is important to keep working on this kind of systems with a view to overcoming time restrictions on the execution of therapeutic speech strategies, reducing costs particularly to the benefit of socially vulnerable populations, increasing the productivity of professionals through the use of virtual environments, and promoting playful interaction between patients and robots. In addition to the excellent teamwork with my thesis directors Miguel Ángel Cazorla and José María Cañas, I am grateful for the multidisciplinary collaboration with Carlos Morales, Emilia Solís, Silvia Soto and Adriana Jones in the functional and experimental validation of the platform at the University of Costa Rica and the Special Education Centre of Heredia.”