Queen Margaret University's (QMU) pioneering technologies and speech therapy techniques are helping people who have struggled to improve their speech with traditional therapies.
QMU has developed electropalatography which, for the first time, allows users to see the position of the tongue in the mouth during speech. Children respond well to the visual feedback, which is not ordinarily available in speech therapy, and does not rely purely on what the child hears.
The child wears a customised artificial dental palate containing 62 electrodes that detect the child’s tongue movement on the roof of the mouth during speech. This allows the therapist to identify more accurately errors in the child’s speech.
The therapist wears a customised palate, allowing them to demonstrate the correct patterns to the child on a computer screen. The child looks at these patterns, and then copies the therapist’s tongue movements by recreating the pattern themselves.