TalkBetter: Family-driven Mobile Intervention Care for Children with Language Delay

• Main Authors: HWANG, Inseok, YOO, Chungkuk, HWANG, Chanyou, YIM, Dongsun, LEE, Youngki, MIN, Chulhong, KIM, Hjohn, SONG, Junehwa
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Language delay; speech-language pathology; mobile; children; parent; smartphone; conversation; turn-taking; insitu intervention; everyday life; Medicine and Health Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2074; http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531668
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Language delay is a developmental problem of children who do not acquire language as expected for their chronological ages. Without timely intervention, language delay can act as a lifelong risk factor. Speech-language pathologists highlight that effective parent participation in everyday parent-child conversation is important to treat children's language delay. For effective roles, however, parents need to alter their own lifelong-established conversation habits, requiring extensive period of conscious effort and staying alert. In this paper, we present new opportunities for mobile and social computing to reinforce everyday parent-child conversation with therapeutic implications for children with language delays. Specifically, we propose TalkBetter, a mobile in-situ intervention service to help parents in daily parent-child conversation through real-time meta-linguistic analysis of ongoing conversations. Through extensive field studies with speech-language pathologists and parents, we report the multilateral motivations and implications of TalkBetter. We present our development of TalkBetter prototype and report its performance evaluation.