Designing Towards Maximum Motivation and Engagement in an Interactive Speech Therapy Game

Children with speech impairments often find speech curriculums tedious, limiting how often children are motivated to practice. A speech therapy game has the potential to make practice fun, may help facilitate increased time and quality of at-home speech therapy, and lead to improved speech. We explore using conversational real-time speech recognition, game methodologies theorized to improve immersion and flow, and user centered approaches to design an immersive interactive speech therapy solution. Our preliminary user evaluation showed that compared to traditional methods, children were more motivated to practice speech using our system.