A SPEECH-LANGUAGE THERAPY TOOL USING INTERACTIVE BOOK APP IN BAHASA MALAYSIA FOR SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN

摘要

Interactive story books (ISB) mobile application is an app designed for children to practice their speech, language and literacy skills. ISB has the potential to be used to support education and learning for individuals with cognitive disabilities. These apps include visual and auditory artifacts that demonstrate language and can be an incredible aid for children with different kinds of speech-language symptoms. In the context of Malaysia, the development of ISB suffers from a lack of practical experience with children, especially for the children who have special needs in speech-language impairments. This research focused on Malaysian children with special needs and their parents. The ISB was developed using the Android platform. The ISB includes three parts: ISB, speech exercise and animated songs. There is a media player to record and play the children?s voices as a way for them to practice their pronunciation. There is also an embedded media player to control the videos to stop or play. The experts with experience in speech-language therapy are gathered to answer a survey about the evaluation on the app. After that, the parents and the children who have special needs are also gathered to answer another survey to get the evaluation on the app as well. These surveys are targeted for collecting the evaluation on the prototype of ISB (content and usability). Based on the result of the survey, the respondents (the experts, parents and children) have the qualifications to take part in the survey, the respondents agree with the content (pictures, music, color and quiz) of the ISB and the respondents also agree with the usability (usefulness, ease of use, ease of learning and satisfaction) of the ISB. Some respondents also give their ideas to improve the app. The main contribution of this study is the developed ISB for speech-language therapy that allows the therapy to be performed by the parents of the special needs children at home without the help of the Speech and Language Pathologists(SLPs). Other than that, the app is also developed by involving the experts, parents and children with special needs to ensure that the app fulfills the requirement for speech -language therapy.