Benefits of Tablet-based Serious Games to Promote Speech Production in Young Children With Hearing Disabilities

University Hospital, Geneva13 enrolled

Overview

Learning to speak is a major challenge for children with hearing impairments. Nowadays, special devices such as conventional hearing aids, bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHA) or cochlear implants (CI) allow successful rehabilitation of patients with hearing disabilities. To obtain maximum benefit from these technical aids, instrumented hearing impaired children require specific and intensive speech therapy to compensate for speech development delays. In addition, it is also of primary importance that during daily life (e.g., at home, at school) children are provided with sufficient and good quality auditory stimulation. The main goal of this project is to encourage speech production with an edutainment tool that can be used at home and that is adapted to the specific needs of young hearing impaired children. For this purpose, the investigators have recently designed an innovative educational solution: FunSpeech, a tablet-based set of video games that respond exclusively to sound and speech. The aim of this serious game is to encourage hearing impaired children to produce controlled sounds in terms of rhythm, intensity, and pitch. These are the main abilities required for controlled speech production. Finally, this serious game aims to support the parents' key role in the speech learning process by offering an effective solution that is easy to use at home with young children.

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

NONE

Enrollment

Conditions

Deafness

Interventions

FunSpeechBEHAVIORAL

Weekly sessions of regular speech therapy as regularly performed for the individual participant (one hour, once or twice a week) and parent-supervised home use of a serious game. It will be recommended to use FunSpeech every day, 15 minutes per day.

ControlBEHAVIORAL

Weekly sessions of regular speech therapy as regularly performed for the individual participant (one hour, once or twice a week).

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMax age: 6 Years

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * Diagnosed with mild to profound hearing loss, * Optimum instrumented hearing (hearing aids, BAHA or CI), * Language development delay confirmed by a speech therapist, * Enough sensorimotor, cognitive and communication skills to play with tablet-based games, * French mother tongue Exclusion Criteria: * Additional impairments which affect language development or the use of FunSpeech (e.g. motor, orofacial, sensory, cognitive), * Refusal of the participant's representative(s) to participate in the study, * Refusal of the participant's representative(s) to participate in a modality of the study, * If the child/participant refuses to collaborate in two measures of language level.

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Parental inventory (questionnaire) and observation grid of speech production skills completed by the speech therapist.

Quantitative and qualitative assessments of spoken language level.

Time frame: 6 months

Secondary Outcomes

Game usage (total play time, frequency of play sessions, list of games used, gameplay goals achieved)

This data will be gathered via a tracking system implemented in the game and parental interviews (questionnaires).