Sentence-level measures of articulatory movements are sensitive to both disease-related changes in PD and speaking-style manipulations.

The layout of a building, real or virtual, affects the flow patterns of its intended users. It is well established, for example, that the placement of pillars at proper locations can often facilitate pedestrian flow during the evacuation of a building. Such considerations are therefore important for architects, game level developers, and others whose domains involve agents navigating through buildings. In this paper, we take the first steps towards developing a simulation framework that can be used to study the optimal placement of architectural elements, such as pillars or doors, for the purposes of facilitating dense pedestrian flow during the evacuation of a building. In particular, we show that the steering algorithms used to model the local navigation abilities of the agents significantly affect the results, which motivates the need for a statistically valid approach and further study.

Purpose This study evaluates the effects of a novel speech therapy program that uses a verbal cue and gamified augmented visual feedback regarding tongue movements to address articulatory hypokinesia during speech in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method Five participants with PD participated in an ABA single-subject design study. The treatment aimed to increase tongue movement size using a combination of a verbal cue and augmented visual feedback and was conducted in 10 45-min sessions over 5 weeks. The presence of visual feedback was manipulated during treatment. Articulatory working space of the tongue was the primary outcome measure and was examined during treatment and in cued and uncued sentences pre- and posttreatment. Changes in speech intelligibility in response to a verbal cue pre- and posttreatment were also examined. Results During treatment, 4/5 participants showed a beneficial effect of visual feedback on tongue articulatory working space. At the end of the treatment, they used larger tongue movements when cued, relative to their pretreatment performance. None of the participants, however, generalized the effect to the uncued sentences. Speech intelligibility of cued sentences was judged as superior posttreatment only in a single participant. Conclusions This study demonstrated that using an augmented visual feedback approach is beneficial, beyond a verbal cue alone, in addressing articulatory hypokinesia in individuals with PD. An optimal degree of articulatory expansion might, however, be required to elicit a speech intelligibility benefit.