Factors in the Development of a Training Program for Use with Tactile Devices

Abstract

A review of the literature suggests that, in order to maximize the benefits available through a tactile device, it must be accompanied by an effective and adaptive training program. There are a number of factors to consider in the design of such a training program, including the type of tasks and response formats to include, the amount of training, subject motivation and device use, the characteristics of the potential user population, the specific device to be used and the type of information it provides, and the evaluation procedures to be followed. The type and saliency of the information provided by a partie ular tactile device are highlighted as the most important yet neglected consideration in designing a training program. The training program used with the University of Melbourne's multiplechannel elee trotactile device is presented to show how these important factors may be addressed, to indicate the flexibility required in a training program, and to provide a general framework on which researchers may base the development of programs for other tactile devices. The last decade has seen an increased development of tactile devices designed to assist speech perception for the hearing impaired (reviewed by Lynch, Oller, & Eilers, 1989; Reed, Durlach, Delhorne, Rabinowitz, & Grant, 1989; Sherrick, 1984). Despite a concentration on hardware development, the importance of training in achieving speech perception benefits with tactile devices has been recognized. Device design faults and poor training have been suggested as the major limiting factors in speech perception results achieved to date with tactile devices (Reed et al, 1989). In addition, performance with tactile devices measured before training does not necessarily accurately reflect posttraining benefits to speech perception (Engelmann & Rosov, 1975; Weisenberger, 1987; Weisenberger & Miller, 1987). Furthermore, perception of isolated words by hearing-impaired subjects using a tactile vocoder has been shown to improve with practice, and it was suggested that this was due to the training received

Training Approaches with Tactile Aids

“…All of the children had acquired Ling's (1976) Stage 1 consonants and the point vowels /a/, /u/, and /i/. These results indicate the value of the tactile aid, and individual training in developing both speech recep tion and speech production skills and are consistent with those obtained by other researchers in this field (Eilers et al, 1993;Galvin et al, 1991Galvin et al, , 1993Oiler & Eilers, 1988). It should be noted that no attempt was made during the testing to determine the relative contributions of auditory and tactual cues to speech perception.…”

Rehabilitative Challenges in Working with the Late-Deafened Adult

“…In addition, open-set speech recognition continues to elude most adult users. Galvin, Cowan, Sarant, Blarney, and Clark (1993) advised that the rehabilitative plan prescribed should be related to the processing provided by a specific vibrotactile device. Therefore, in application of any assistive device, training should be formulated based on the cues the technology makes available.…”

Issues in the Development of Multichannel Tactile Devices for Hearing-Impaired Children and Adults

“…Although this may be a direct result of factors previously discussed, such as the specific speech cues encoded by the particular tactile device or the motivation of the patient to learn to use these cues, an alternative explanation could be the more limited training that has generally been employed in tactile device studies as compared with the long-term habilitation required of experienced Tadoma users. Galvin et al (1993) have described the development of the habilitation program used with the Tickle Talker, which has concentrated on developing integration of tactile input with information from aided residual hearing and/or lipreading to improve perception of words, sentences, and running speech. A number of important factors to be considered in development of training programs were identified, including: type of training tasks, amount of training, motivation and device use by the subject, user characteristics, response formats used in training, information presented through the device, and the evaluation procedures implemented.…”