Evaluating the Educational Benefits of Tablet-based Serious Games to Promote Speech Production in Instrumented Young Children With Hearing Disabilities
Trial Snapshot
- Phase
- Not Applicable
- Status
- Completed
- Sponsor
- University Hospital, Geneva
- Enrollment
- 13
- Locations
- 1
- Primary Endpoint
- Parental inventory (questionnaire) and observation grid of speech production skills completed by the speech therapist.
Study Overview
Brief Summary
Learning to speak is a major challenge for children with hearing impairments. Nowadays, special devices such as conventional hearing aids, bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHA) or cochlear implants (CI) allow successful rehabilitation of patients with hearing disabilities. To obtain maximum benefit from these technical aids, instrumented hearing impaired children require specific and intensive speech therapy to compensate for speech development delays. In addition, it is also of primary importance that during daily life (e.g., at home, at school) children are provided with sufficient and good quality auditory stimulation.
The main goal of this project is to encourage speech production with an edutainment tool that can be used at home and that is adapted to the specific needs of young hearing impaired children. For this purpose, the investigators have recently designed an innovative educational solution: FunSpeech, a tablet-based set of video games that respond exclusively to sound and speech. The aim of this serious game is to encourage hearing impaired children to produce controlled sounds in terms of rhythm, intensity, and pitch. These are the main abilities required for controlled speech production. Finally, this serious game aims to support the parents' key role in the speech learning process by offering an effective solution that is easy to use at home with young children.
Study Design
- Study Type
- Interventional
- Allocation
- Randomized
- Intervention Model
- Crossover
- Primary Purpose
- Supportive Care
- Masking
- None
Eligibility Criteria
- Ages
- — to 6 Years (Child)
- Sex
- All
- Accepts Healthy Volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria
- •Diagnosed with mild to profound hearing loss,
- •Optimum instrumented hearing (hearing aids, BAHA or CI),
- •Language development delay confirmed by a speech therapist,
- •Enough sensorimotor, cognitive and communication skills to play with tablet-based games,
- •French mother tongue
Exclusion Criteria
- •Additional impairments which affect language development or the use of FunSpeech (e.g. motor, orofacial, sensory, cognitive),
- •Refusal of the participant's representative(s) to participate in the study,
- •Refusal of the participant's representative(s) to participate in a modality of the study,
- •If the child/participant refuses to collaborate in two measures of language level.
Arms & Interventions
Primo-control
Participants will begin the study by a control period without the game (45 days) followed by a period using FunSpeech (45 days). This sequence will be repeated once.
Intervention: Control (Behavioral)
Primo-FunSpeech
Participants will begin the study by a period using FunSpeech (45 days) followed by a control period without the game (45 days). This sequence will be repeated once.
Intervention: FunSpeech (Behavioral)
Outcomes
Primary Outcomes
Parental inventory (questionnaire) and observation grid of speech production skills completed by the speech therapist.
Time Frame: 6 months
Quantitative and qualitative assessments of spoken language level.
Secondary Outcomes
- Game usage (total play time, frequency of play sessions, list of games used, gameplay goals achieved)(6 months)
Investigators
Angelica Perez Fornos
Principal Investigator
University Hospital, Geneva