Social robotics in therapy of apraxia of speech [Online]
Journal of Healthcare Engineering
2018
Vol 2018
Number
First page
Last page

Apraxia of speech is a motor speech disorder in which messages from the
brain to the mouth are disrupted, resulting in an inability for moving lips or
tongue to the right place to pronounce sounds correctly. Current therapies for
this condition involve a therapist that in one-on-one sessions conducts the exercises. Our aim is to work in the line of robotic therapies in which a robot is
able to perform partially or autonomously a therapy session, endowing a social
robot with the ability of assisting therapists in apraxia of speech rehabilitation
exercises. Therefore, we integrate computer vision and machine learning techniques to detect the mouth pose of the user and, on top of that, our social robot
performs autonomously the different steps of the therapy using multimodal interaction.