Benefits of Tablet-based Serious Games to Promote Speech Production in Young Children With Hearing Disabilities (FunSpeech)

University Hospitals (UH)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Hearing Loss; Deafness

Treatments: Behavioral: Control; Behavioral: FunSpeech

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04454255

ID 2019-02138

Details and patient eligibility

About

Learning to speak is a major challenge for children with hearing impairments. Nowadays, special devices such as conventional hearing aids, bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHA) or cochlear implants (CI) allow successful rehabilitation of patients with hearing disabilities. To obtain maximum benefit from these technical aids, instrumented hearing impaired children require specific and intensive speech therapy to compensate for speech development delays. In addition, it is also of primary importance that during daily life (e.g., at home, at school) children are provided with sufficient and good quality auditory stimulation.

The main goal of this project is to encourage speech production with an edutainment tool that can be used at home and that is adapted to the specific needs of young hearing impaired children. For this purpose, the investigators have recently designed an innovative educational solution: FunSpeech, a tablet-based set of video games that respond exclusively to sound and speech. The aim of this serious game is to encourage hearing impaired children to produce controlled sounds in terms of rhythm, intensity, and pitch. These are the main abilities required for controlled speech production. Finally, this serious game aims to support the parents' key role in the speech learning process by offering an effective solution that is easy to use at home with young children.

Enrollment: 13 patients

Sex: All

Ages: Under 6 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Diagnosed with mild to profound hearing loss,
• Optimum instrumented hearing (hearing aids, BAHA or CI),
• Language development delay confirmed by a speech therapist,
• Enough sensorimotor, cognitive and communication skills to play with tablet-based games,
• French mother tongue

Exclusion criteria

• Additional impairments which affect language development or the use of FunSpeech (e.g. motor, orofacial, sensory, cognitive),
• Refusal of the participant's representative(s) to participate in the study,
• Refusal of the participant's representative(s) to participate in a modality of the study,
• If the child/participant refuses to collaborate in two measures of language level.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Supportive Care

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Crossover Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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13 participants in 2 patient groups

Primo-FunSpeech

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will begin the study by a period using FunSpeech (45 days) followed by a control period without the game (45 days). This sequence will be repeated once.

Treatment:

Behavioral: FunSpeech

Primo-control

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will begin the study by a control period without the game (45 days) followed by a period using FunSpeech (45 days). This sequence will be repeated once.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Control