Aural Analytics LLC — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NIDCD

Description

AbstractSummary The inability to engage in spoken communication is among the most debilitating of all human conditionsIn the field of communication disordersa speech language pathologist sSLP sperceptual evaluation of the quality of speech production is the gold standard for assessment and for documenting treatment progressHoweverdecades of research has confirmed that auditory perceptual judgments of speech are inherently biasedwhich compromises reliabilityThe reason is that the human perceptual system is adaptivewith perceptual bias accrued by working with an individual across multiple treatment sessionsor by working with patient populations across a careerThusto reliably document treatment outcomes subjectivelyit is necessary to involve multipleunfamiliar listenersThis is untenable in most clinical settingswhich means that subjective impressions are made by the treating cliniciansThe reliance on subjective evaluation directly undermines the quality of clinical practice and a clinician s ability to demonstrate the efficacy of an interventionAural Analytics has developed new objective acoustic speech metrics that track with disease progression in neurological disordersOur technology is based on a strong scientific premise and has been adopted early by pharmaceutical companies and neurologists in clinical researchWe have collected and analyzed tens of thousands of speech samples using our technologyand the results are demonstrating that our measures are robustreliableand more sensitive to longitudinal changes in speech than are other existing outcome measuresWith this proposal we aim to translate this technology to SLP clinical practice by developing an appbased automated solution that provides objective speech based outcomes and to solve the clinical crises created by reliance on subjective ratingsOur SBIR Phase I project will have two specific aimsIn SAwe will develop a stand alone application that SLPs can use to objectively evaluate the effects of behavioral interventionThis will require translating the existing algorithms to Pythondeveloping an Application Programming Interfaceand designing a mobile application that speech language pathologists can use in clinical practiceIn SAin collaboration with Barrow Neurological Institutewe will validate the usability of the application in a clinical setting through beta testing with SLPsThe deliverable of this proposal will be a fullyfunctional mobile application with real time metricsthat will be ready for a clinical evaluation in a follow on Phase II proposal Narrative In the field of communication disordersa speech language pathologist s perceptual evaluation of the quality of speech production is the gold standard for assessment and for documenting treatment progressWe propose to augment subjective evaluation of speech in this field with a set of objective outcome measures that have been shown to successfully track clinically relevant changes in speech productionOur approach is based on extensive published research and has already been adopted by pharmaceutical companies and neurologists in clinical research