Emily Diep

My name is Emily Diep and I am a high school student in California. I enjoy building tools to engage children with speech practice while reinforcing the sound articulation that they learn from their speech therapists. In the past, I have volunteered at a local elementary school for providing additional speech articulation practice to children with speech delay outside their therapy sessions.

I learned about children with speech delay and their lifelong challenges through my younger brother’s experience. His speech articulation challenges have caused many social development problems because his classmates could not understand him. Some of his classmates have ignored him, while others have bullied him due to his inability to speak up. Given the impacts of speech disorder on him, I was determined to make a product that can improve the speech articulation of children with speech delay.

About 1-2% percent of the population suffer from speech sound errors through adolescence. One of the most common sound errors is the American-R articulation. After many years of conventional speech therapy, some students with speech delay are still struggling to enunciate the sound correctly. However, previous research has shown that these students can improve from biofeedback as a supplementary tool.

Last year, I created a Smart Bracelet with keyword detection and a built-in AI-driven speech therapy game designed to engage kids to practice their speech articulation at home. After using the bracelet for 1 month, the results from two participants show that both students’ speech articulation had improved. This year, I am turning my Smart Bracelet into a mobile app with an audio visualizer so that more children can access it and learn from its visual feedback.

Research suggests that children above the age of 9 who still have difficulty speaking the R phoneme are considered unusual. Additionally, their speech articulation improves significantly when biofeedback is given as the first stage of treatment for speech delay. I hope that speech pathologists would use my mobile app during speech therapy sessions for speech articulation practice, and recommend it to their students for at-home practice. I will release the app with the added spectrogram onto the app store.