Social Robotics in Therapy of Apraxia of Speech

Abstract

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.

Artificial Vision Algorithms for Socially Assistive Robot Applications: A Review of the Literature

“…However, not all algorithms have specified that they run in real time. For instance, refs [ 30 , 36 ] were tested offline. Regarding the computer resources used to recognize facial expressions, two implementations are reported using basic hardware computers [ 34 , 39 ] and computers with graphic cards [ 30 , 31 ].…”

“…Moreover, to classify and determine the distance between the points assigned to the face, the fuzzy c-means method was implemented. Another robot that uses a point cloud to offer therapy is the Mini robot presented by Castillo et al in [ 36 ], which helps people with mouth articulation problems when speaking. It uses a computer vision system based on Kinect, which extracts the posture of the mouth and, using the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, verifies that the posture of the mouth corresponds to the exercise being performed; in this way, it detects errors to provide visual and audible help to the person.…”

Assistive Technology for Elderly Care: An Overview

“…Other kind of physical rehabilitation refers to speech therapy sessions. In this context, Castillo et al [18] proposed a social robot to guide in Apraxia rehabilitation such that it focuses on improving the planning, sequencing, and coordination of muscle movements for speech production. So, a friendly companion robot advises the user (elder or others) without any judgement, while evaluating their performance and correcting them when necessary.…”

A Low-Cost Cognitive Assistant

“…Using friendly robots to interact with the user was the work of Castillo et al [16]. The objective was to use a robot to guide the users in therapy sessions for apraxia of speech.…”