Speech-assisted communicative aid for dysarthric speakers in offing

CHENNAI: A team of professors, along with the National Institute for Empowerment of Persons with Multiple Disabilities (NIEPMD), has come out with a speech-assisted communicative aid to help people struggling with speech disorders. The new equipment will help those suffering from partial or complete speech impairment tackle communication problems in their daily lives.

As a large number of people struggle with dysarthria, Professor P Vijayalakshmi, Department of ECE at SSN College of Engineering and her team collected a database of Tamil dysarthric speech with the help of NIEPMD to contribute to rehabilitation research. Using this database, the team has developed a Speech-Assistive Communication Aid for dysarthric speakers mounted on a Raspberry pi. This aid can also be extended as an application in the future.

Vijayalakshmi and her team worked closely with 20 dysarthric speakers from NIEPMD for almost three years and have collated a speech corpus of Tamil syllables that can be used by different software to assist dysarthric patients. The collection has been approved by the Head of the Institution and the Head of Speech and Language Department, NIEPMD and is distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), University of Pennsylvania.

“The techniques or devices developed using this database can be used by the speech disorder community, especially people with the articulatory disorder, in India for communicating.

Further, this database can help developing systems to assess the severity of speech disorders,” says Vijayalakshmi.

As per the survey conducted by the Union government in 2011, speech disorder is listed as the fifth-highest disability, with a prevalence rate of 7.5 per cent. “Many people are unaware of the communicative aid they can use for their daily activities.

The vast population of people who suffer from speech disabilities would benefit from the newly-developed aid,” she added.