Presentation of a new EU project for speech therapy: OLP (Ortho-Logo-Paedia)

This paper presents an overview of a newly started EU-funded research project and outlines the design of the speech therapy structure to be used within the project. The OLP (Ortho-Logo-Paedia) project aims at improving the quality of life of persons with articulatory impairments by applying a novel technological aid to speech therapy, by integrating this training with speech recognition technology and by making these facilities available over the Internet. The OLP project is an EU Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources project, coordinated by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athens, Greece, with participation from France (Arches), Greece (Altec S.A. and Logos Centre for Speech-Voice Pathology), Spain (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Sweden (KTH), and the UK (Sheffield University and Barnsley District General Hospital). Introduction and overview This project proposes to apply a method to supplement (not replace) speech therapy for specific disorders at the articulation level based on an integrated computer-based system together with automatic speech recognition and distance learning. The key features of this proposal are: (a) therapy is based on real-time audio-visual feedback of client's speech productions, while therapy sessions are designed for each speech disorder separately and tailored specifically for each client; (b) speech production evaluation and interfacing to assistive technology is provided through automatic speech recognition based on statistical models of the data collected in the training/therapy phase; (c) web services provide remote collaboration and data collection for analysis and evaluation in diverse conditions. These features correspond to the major system components: 1. OPTACIA developed from the Optical Logo-Therapy OLT, (Hatzis, 1999; Hatzis & Green, 2001) will visualise vocal tract configurations and trajectories through a tailored acoustic-to-articulation kinematic mapping in 2D or 3D. A therapist will be able to design a map, or select a predefined one, to suit an individual client. OPTACIA will thus provide the client with real-time visual feedback about her/his speech: articulator configuration will correspond to map position and articulator movement will correspond to map trajectory. It will be possible to reuse data collected during therapy sessions to retrain the mapping. 2. GRIFOS will be a speaker-dependent, small-vocabulary, automatic speech recognition system. Training data will be gathered through OPTACIA sessions, supplementing existing databases of material from similar client cases. In early sessions, GRIFOS will serve to set appropriate thresholds in OPTACIA to control acceptability of a client’s speech productions and to analyse quantitatively these productions in syllable and word context during speech therapy. In later stages, it will primarily serve to evaluate client productions in continuous speech, with training material taken from OPTACIA sessions. For clients with severe articulation problems (e.g., dysarthria) unlikely to be fully resolved by therapy, GRIFOS will help stabilise production by providing feedback to increase production consistency rather than intelligibility per se. This will allow reliable interfacing to synthetic speech output and other assistive technology devices. Only speech synthesis (from already developed and available systems) will be used to test this functionality in the present project. 3. TELEMACHOS will apply distancelearning principles based on web database technology to provide the system’s remote tutoring and monitoring ability. Telemedicine technology will enable wide application of the system Speech, Music and Hearing 46 and remote data collection and evaluation. It will facilitate remote speech therapy sessions as well as diagnostic and remedial information sharing. An overview of OLP functionality is illustrated in Figure 1 for the on-site case.