The Effectiveness of Smartphone-Based Speech Therapy for People with Post-Stroke Dysarthria

Overview

This clinical trial aims to determine if a new smartphone-based speech therapy is effective self-treatment method for patients with post-stroke dysarthria. For this study, participants in the intervention group will use the speech therapy app for 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, over a 4-week period. The active control group will receive home-based speech therapy with the same duration and frequency as the intervention group. The study will help us understand if smartphone-based speech therapy is a viable treatment option for post-stroke dysarthria patients.

In this study, 100 patients with post-stroke dysarthria will be recruited and stratified into acute-subacute (within 1 month after index stroke) and chronic (after 6 months after index stroke) groups. Participants will then be randomly assigned to either the intervention or active control group. Patients in the intervention group will use a smartphone-based speech therapy app that includes oro-motor exercise, phonation, articulation, resonance, syllable repetition, and reading exercises. Treatment goals and contents will be determined based on individual patient conditions by a speech-language pathologist after the baseline evaluation. Participants will receive daily sessions for 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, over a 4-week period. Patients in the active control group will receive home-based speech therapy, which includes oro-motor exercises and reading tasks from a workbook, for the same frequency as the intervention group. Both groups will also receive usual stroke care. The study aims to evaluate the efficacy of mobile-based speech therapy compared to home-based speech therapy in improving speech intelligibility scores 4 weeks after baseline for patients with dysarthria in the acute-subacute and chronic phases following stroke.