Stuttering Assessment System

Project Title

Project Area of Specialization

Computer Science

Project Summary

In this era of technological advancement and unprecedented change where the rate of innovations and discoveries are occurring at quite a pace, whilst in the field of psychology, assessments are still done manually. Therefore, we believe we can take a step forward to automatize assessments in the domain of stuttering speech disorder.
Android based Stuttering Assessment System is basically android based application that will be used by speech language pathologists(SLP) to diagnose, assess and check the severity of patients struggling with stuttering speech disorder.The main purpose of this project is to automatize the assessments performed manually by the speech language pathologists.
Our system will include Assessment procedures such as measuring the frequency of stuttering, stuttered words per minute, average longest duration, total words spoken per minute, types of disfluencies and reading contexts, along with qualitative measurement of associated behaviors. Results of these analyses will provide diagnostic information about stuttering severity. It will help speech language pathologists save strenuous hours they have to spend on assessment and severity measurements. Moreover, it will save patients from the conventional way of performing assessments.

Project Objectives

A lot of work has been done to develop such tools that help the patients, for example, virtual reality simulations are used to help people over come their phobias. However, in terms of assessments, not much has been accomplished. We aim to develop a system which benefits the clinicians by replacing the conventional way of assessing their patients to an application that does it for them. Our project will mainly focus on the following objectives:

Patients will be able to record their speech and share their results with speech-language pathologist.
The system will be able to identify the disfluency type.
The system will count the frequency of words stuttered.
The system will count stuttered words per minute.
The system will be able to calculate the average longest duration of stuttering.
System will give diagnosis and measure severity level.
Speech-language Pathologist will be able to view results and make recommendations.

Project Implementation Method

Our system helps Speech-language pathologists save hours they usually spend by assessing a patient with their conventional ways. Firstly, patient will record audio by reading a predefined passage in the application and submit the audio. Next, the system will analyze the audio and calculate the parameters required for the assessment such as:

Frequency of stuttered words
Stuttered words per minute
Total words spoken per minute
The average duration of stuttering

Once the system has calculated the parameters mentioned above, the patient will be able to view their result. After that, the patient can view profiles of SLP’s and send requests to their selected therapist. Furthermore, patients can perform assessments numerous times and can track their progress. SLP on the other end can accept or reject a patient’s request. Once they accept the request, they will be able to view patient’s profile, history and detailed assessment results. Lastly, on the basis of patient’s result, they can either give recommendations or notify for a one to one session.

Benefits of the Project

Stuttering Assessment system will benefit both patient and speech language pathologists in terms of time.
Speech language pathologist will directly view the results of its respective patient rather than spending hours listening to the recordings and finding out disfluency in a patient’s speech.
Speech language pathologist can easily either give recommendations or notify for a one to one session based on patient’s result.
Patient can track their progress by analyzing their previous results.
Patient can perform assessments anywhere and anytime they want.
Patient can share the results with their selected SLP, without visiting the clinic.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The final deliverable of " Stuttering Assessment System" will be an android based application along with documentation manual having all technical details of the application. It will be developed in Java along with Firebase database. We will develope a python's api that we will integrate with our andorid application. The application will be compatible with android api version 21 and above.