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Identifier

000388405

Title

Development of interactive user interfaces for voice training aimed to children with hearing loss using web technologies in real time

Alternative Title

Ανάπτυξη διαδραστικών εφαρμογών για εκπαίδευση φωνής σε παιδιά με προβλήματα ακοής χρησιμοποιώντας διαδικτυακές τεχνολογίες σε πραγματικό χρόνο

Author

Αποστολάκης, Μύρων Χ.

Thesis advisor

Στυλιανού, Ιωάννης

Reviewer

Τζίτζικας, Ιωάννης
Μουχτάρης, Αθανάσιος
Αργυρός, Αντώνιος

Abstract

International research and global statistics have shown that 1.5% of children up to the age of 20 years have reduced auditory ability 1 in 22 children of school age have impaired hearing, which means that in nowadays in Europe there are about one million hearing-impaired children, while in the U.S. 12,000 children born annually or 33 children a day with hearing loss. In Greece, statistically hard of hearing children are estimated at about 80,000. These data classify the hearing loss first among the diseases of newborns. It is often, people with hearing loss to have problems with their communication skills. Because of the lack of audio feedback the speech production system is not developed normally. Since deaf people cannot hear themselves speak, they cannot tune their voices to a more 'correct' sounding tone. More generally they cannot control their speech production system (tongue, teeth etc) properly, because they cannot realize which is the right way to do it. As a result they speak too loud for the vowels or they are misarticulating consonants. However, a person who went deaf later on in life, has a better chance of being able to speak more properly. So, everything is a matter of feedback. The purpose of this thesis is to introduce a new approach of speech therapy multimedia tools based on the state of art web technologies and taking into account the special characteristics of hearing impaired people, in order to help them acquire better communication skills. This approach is taking advantage of special speech properties such as intensity, pitch and spectrograms using them as visual feedback, in order to teach a person with hearing loss how to improve control of his voice. More specifically we developed a web site platform, where the user can login and practice with a collection of web-based voice games, through browser in real time. The technologies which were used for the implementation of our games is Java, Javascript, HTML5, CSS3 and frameworks like Apache Shiro and Hibernate. The database which is used is MySQL and XAMPP as web server. Voice is analyzed and converted to visual feedback. Each game could be played with a logo-therapy supervisor or even by user himself. Score of each game, is calculated and is sent to our web server for saving and statistic processing. In the end, user performance in the passage of time is displayed through graphs in real time. A logo-therapy supervisor could use these special graphs to spot possible weaknesses and propose modification of game targets as necessary. Furthermore, the evaluation of our plat¬form is performed by specialists in speech therapy. Finally, comparison between state of art technologies (HTML5, JavaScript) and older, such as Java, in terms of flexibility and performance is taking place.

Language

English, Greek

Subject

Logotherapy

Απώλεια ακοής

Εκπαίδευση φωνής μέσω διαδικτύου

Issue date

2014-11-21

Collection

School/Department--School of Sciences and Engineering--Department of Computer Science--Post-graduate theses

Type of Work--Post-graduate theses

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