A NOVEL COMPUTER-AIDED NEUROLINGUISTIC APPROACH TO THE TREATMENT OF APHASIA

Abstract

Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production and/or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. Aphasia is always due to injury to the brain, most commonly from a stroke, particularly in older individuals. This paper presents a novel computer-aided training and rehabilitation approach to the therapy of aphasia. The system helps to treat and overcome the most severe consequences of this language disorder. The introduced novel methods and algorithms provide the implementation of self-adaptive training exercises to be used in different fields of the neurolinguistic therapy. They support all linguistic modalities and all important difficulty options used in the traditional face-to-face therapy. A software module was implemented based on the presented methods realizing a self-adaptive difficulty level control and multimedia exercises. The introduced system is embedded into a tele-rehabilitation framework, which offers a uniform interface for various telecare applications. The pilot study of the developed system is ongoing at several clinical sites in Germany.