Measuring performance of children with speech and language disorders using a serious game

摘要

Speech therapy via serious games gives an opportunity to children with speech disorders and hearing problems to overcome their problems by playing serious games. As far as children are more inclined to play games, so we intend to learn them by entertainments. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a serious game that can be used both as therapy and as a tool to measure the performance of children with speech impediments. The game consists of three steps. The first step provides information for parents or therapists to decide if their child needs speech therapy or not. In the second step, the child starts to learn specific words while playing the game. The third step aims to measure the performance of the child and evaluate how much the child has learned at the end of the game. The game has an avatar which can be controlled by the child through speech, with the objective of moving the avatar around the environment to earn coins. The avatar is controlled by both voice commands such as Jump, Ahead, Back, Left, Right, and arrow keys of the keyboard. The game allows the child to practice longer hours, compared to clinical approaches under the supervision of a therapist, which are time-limited. Our preliminary performance measurements indicate an improvement of 40% for children who play our game 5 times.