The use of innovative technology in the field of Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) has gained significant attention nowadays. Despite being a promising research area, Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have not been thoroughly studied and used in SLT. This paper makes two main contributions: firstly, providing a comprehensive review of existing research on the use of SARs to enhance communication skills in children and adolescents. Secondly, organizing the information into tables that categorize the interactive play scenarios described in the surveyed papers. The inclusion criteria for play scenarios in the tables are based only on their effectiveness for SLT proven by experimental findings. The data, systematically presented in a table format, allow readers to easily find relevant information based on various factors, such as disorder type, age, treatment technique, robot type, etc. The study concludes that the despite limited research on the use of social robots for children and adolescents with communication disorders (CD), promising outcomes have been reported. The authors discuss the methodological, technical, and ethical limitations related to the use of SARs for SLT in clinical or home environments, as well as the huge potential of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a secondary assistive technology to facilitate speech and language interventions.
Introduction: The complex speech-language and kinesitherapeutic assessment in persons with acquired neurological diseases require a very specific and accurate assessment. It requires the use of a number of tests and full knowledge of the possibilities of disability. Aim and objective: The aim of the research is to create a methodology for general assessment in neurologically diseased patients, using specialized equipment-device for digital assessment and analysis of the bite and analysis of dynamic and static muscle gait activity and random muscle groups. Methods: The study was conducted in 2022 in the Center of Logopedics at the Faculty of Public Health, Health Care and Sport, SWU “Neofit Rilski” in Blagoevgrad. Specialized assessment was applied to 25 patients with neurological diseases. They were divided into two groups - experimental (15 patients) and control - 10 patients. In our study, we used the Barthel Index and The Gugging Swallowing Screen to verify the data. Statistically significant difference was reported using nonparametric statistics and Mann-Whitney tests. The statistical package we used was Prism 3,0. Results: In our study, we examined the activities of daily living using the Barthel index scale and the swallowing screen test. All patients were tested after the hospitalization and on the 30th day of it. There was a statistically significant difference Asymp. Sig. ≤ 0.01, which proves that there were changes in the activities of daily living and swallowing. Discussion: Proper selection of a test battery and application of specialized complex therapy (speech therapy and kinesitherapy) can increase the quality of life of patients.
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