"In-person evaluation and care are excellent options, but telepractice and visual biofeedback methods have proven to be successful as well."

A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO SPEECH THERAPY

BY ANDREW MEES

Professor Elaine Hitchcock and a team of volunteer researchers at Montclair State University are overseeing critical research to advance patient care for individuals with long-standing speech problems.

The pandemic has changed parts of our way of life forever – including the ways in which patients are treated across the healthcare industry. Out of necessity, innovative new methods of treatment currently under investigation at Montclair State University have been adapted for online use over the past two years: And Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders Elaine Hitchcock and a team of speech-language pathologists and graduate research clinicians in the institution's Clinical Biofeedback Lab (sites.google.com/view/msu-cbl/home) are overseeing this critical research to allow speech therapy to effectively evolve for the greater good.

In collaboration with colleagues Tara McAllister of New York University and Jonathon Preston of Syracuse University, Hitchcock is currently overseeing a pair of federally funded research grants totaling more than $1.8 million, with each allowing for the study of telehealth and in-person speech therapy using visual biofeedback methods.

The grants – a $1.375 million sub-award as part of a study led by NYU that evaluates biofeedback-enhanced treatment for Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) in children, and a $430,000 award to study the efficacy of virtual speech therapy practices – have yielded findings that will improve future patient care.

"The pandemic has necessitated ongoing shifts towards telepractice delivery, and the need for research to validate the efficacy of this type of treatment," said Hitchcock. "But it's also provided the opportunity to reexamine in-person therapy, and see how it can be even further enhanced to provide the best possible care. These studies have yielded findings that will be able to help things change for the better,

and which will also be publicly available, so that anyone can benefit."

Innovative Approaches Yield New Treatment Options

As part of the studies, Hitchcock and the research team tested not only visual biofeedback treatment of SSD, but also converted two tasks typically administered in an in-person setting to a virtual application to assess the efficacy of telehealth treatment.

In the first study, the team utilized visual biofeedback treatment – which uses instrumentation to create a real-time visual display of different parts of speech that may be subtle or difficult to perceive – to study its success against traditional methods. Participants were presented a visual target and asked to alter speech patterns to match the target. The goal of the process was to provide new insights into the unconscious processes behind speech production so that they may be brought under conscious control.

Preliminary results of the study show that respondents showed a stronger response to the visual biofeedback than traditional methods, setting the stage for increased use of the approach in standard practice.

In the telehealth study, 80 typically developing children, ranging in age from 9-15, were given two tasks – identification of items along a synthetic continuum from "rake" to "wake", and category goodness judgment of /r/ sounds spoken by various talkers with and without SSD – in an in-per- son setting. Fifty children in the same age group were mailed a standard headset and given the same tasks in a telehealth format. Findings revealed that children performed in similarly both in-person and online.