An Internet-Based Telerehabilitation System for the Assessment of Motor Speech Disorders: A Pilot Study

Abstract

The online assessment of motor speech disorders using an Internet-based telerehabilitation system is feasible. This study suggests that with additional refinement of the technology and assessment protocols, reliable assessment of motor speech disorders over the Internet is possible. Future research methods are outlined.

The Redesign and Re-evaluation of an Internet-Based Telerehabilitation System for the Assessment of Dysarthria in Adults

“…4,5 The results reported by Hill et al 5 were promising with the majority of assessments demonstrating high reliably when administered via the telerehabilitation system. However, the authors acknowledged a number of limitations, including participant and rater variability, poor definition within the assessment tools, and technical issues.…”

“…However, the authors acknowledged a number of limitations, including participant and rater variability, poor definition within the assessment tools, and technical issues. 5 These limitations introduced some uncertainty to the conclusions that dysarthria could be reliably and validly assessed via telerehabilitation.…”

“…The potential for participant variability impacting upon the results of the Hill et al 5 study was significant, given that participants were assessed twice with a number of days between assessments. Considerable daily variation often occurs in the speech of people with dysarthria, which may have reduced the ability to achieve acceptable agreement across two different occasions.…”

Quantifying perturbations in temporal dynamics for automated assessment of spastic dysarthric speech intelligibility

“…Objective measures aim to deliver scores that are highly correlated with the intelligibility ratings obtained from subjective listening experiments. In fact, there is growing evidence that objective measures are being used to assist clinicians in dysarthria treatment decisions [2].…”

A Review of the Evidence for the Use of Telemedicine Within Stroke Systems of Care

“…However, because this study included only 2 stroke patients of 19 total subjects, its generalizability to the stroke population may be limited. 73 In a separate study, Palsbo 74 used a randomized, doublecrossover agreement study of 24 poststroke patients randomized to a remote or face-to-face administration of a subset of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination and to remote or face-to-face assessment of speech comprehension, speech expression, and motor speech. The HQ-VTC equipment was operated at a transmission speed of 384 kilobits per second.…”