Teaching Parents Read, Ask, Answer, Prompt Strategies via Telepractice: Effects on Parent Strategy Use and Child Communication.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to explore the feasibility of a telepractice communication partner intervention for children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and their parents. METHOD: Five children (aged 3;4-12;9 [years;months]) with severe expressive communication impairments who use AAC and their parents enrolled in a randomized, multiple-probe design across participants. A speech-language pathologist taught parents to use a least-to-most prompting procedure, Read, Ask, Answer, Prompt (RAAP), during book reading with their children. Parent instruction was provided through telepractice during an initial 60-min workshop and five advanced practice sessions (M = 28.41 min). The primary outcome was parents' correct use of RAAP, measured by the percentage of turns parents applied the strategies correctly. Child communication turns were a secondary, exploratory outcome. RESULTS: There was a functional relation (intervention effect) between the RAAP instruction and parents' correct use of RAAP. All parents showed a large, immediate increase in the level of RAAP use with a stable, accelerating (therapeutic) trend to criterion after the intervention was applied. Increases in child communication turns were inconsistent. One child increased his communication turns. Four children demonstrated noneffects; their intervention responses overlapped with their baseline performance. CONCLUSIONS: Telepractice RAAP strategy instruction is a promising service delivery for communication partner training and AAC interventions. Future research should examine alternate observation and data collection and ways to limit communication partner instruction barriers.

Reconnecting Indigenous Language for a Child Using Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this article is to describe a grassroots project to develop an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system for a child who is learning to speak the Native American Lakota language. The project began as a part of a homeschool curriculum to address the foreign language requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic. CONCLUSIONS: Initially, the mother of the child, who is enrolled in the Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, located a list of the 1,000 most frequently used words in Lakota and a Level 1 textbook and began programming vocabulary by word class in her child's electronic speech-generating AAC system (i.e., the CoughDrop app on an iPad). The programming has grown to include more than 1,600 vocabulary items, and the work continues. A need for symbols that are culturally and linguistically appropriate soon surfaced. Following that, the lack of a synthesized voice that accurately captures the prosody of spoken Lakota became apparent. The development of both has been added to project goals. Eventually, the goal is to have an AAC system that may be used for other speakers of Lakota and, potentially, programming protocols that will lead to the development of similar systems for other Indigenous languages.

TDD-UNet:Transformer with double decoder UNet for COVID-19 lesions segmentation.

The outbreak of new coronary pneumonia has brought severe health risks to the world. Detection of COVID-19 based on the UNet network has attracted widespread attention in medical image segmentation. However, the traditional UNet model is challenging to capture the long-range dependence of the image due to the limitations of the convolution kernel with a fixed receptive field. The Transformer Encoder overcomes the long-range dependence problem. However, the Transformer-based segmentation approach cannot effectively capture the fine-grained details. We propose a transformer with a double decoder UNet for COVID-19 lesions segmentation to address this challenge, TDD-UNet. We introduce the multi-head self-attention of the Transformer to the UNet encoding layer to extract global context information. The dual decoder structure is used to improve the result of foreground segmentation by predicting the background and applying deep supervision. We performed quantitative analysis and comparison for our proposed method on four public datasets with different modalities, including CT and CXR, to demonstrate its effectiveness and generality in segmenting COVID-19 lesions. We also performed ablation studies on the COVID-19-CT-505 dataset to verify the effectiveness of the key components of our proposed model. The proposed TDD-UNet also achieves higher Dice and Jaccard mean scores and the lowest standard deviation compared to competitors. Our proposed method achieves better segmentation results than other state-of-the-art methods.

The role of Augmentative and Alternative Communication in Speech and Language Therapy: A mini review.

Augmentative and Alternative Communication is an aided or unaided means of communication which supports existing communication abilities of an individual or replaces natural speech due to any speech and language disorder. The deficit could be developmental or acquired such as autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, learning difficulties, dysarthria, dyspraxia or due to any acquired neurological condition such as aphasia and other degenerative disorders. Furthermore, it may be due to surgical procedures such as laryngectomy. Alternate means of communication have also been successfully used with COVID-19 patients. These tools may include pictures, symbols, signs or voice output devices. Parents of children with special needs and medical professionals have been reluctant in implementing the approach due to certain misconceptions. The aim of this review is to summarize the current evidence for the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication with a range of disorders in relation to in relation to Pakistan.

Ensuring communication access for all during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond: supporting patients, providers, and caregivers in hospitals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed substantial gaps in communication access for patients across hospital settings. With the rise in positive cases globally, the need for communication enhancement strategies, including augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), has emerged as a critical need. Many resources exist that describe AAC assessment and intervention processes in the acute care setting; however, AAC service provision in the COVID-19 pandemic is fraught with many unanticipated challenges. Patients, providers, and caregivers have encountered significant communication strain both at the bedside and beyond hospital walls, resulting in a communication crisis induced by many COVID-19 related variables. This article describes the sequelae of symptoms a person with COVID-19 may experience, progression of communication needs, and evidence-based solutions to supporting communication access. Barriers related to the COVID-19 pandemic are outlined (e.g., evolving infection control practices, personal protective equipment requirements, visitor policies, and more) along with response recommendations to support communication enhancement efforts for people with and without COVID-19 benefiting from access to AAC.

Deafness and mental health: Clinical challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current health crisis scenario has exposed the negative impact on mental health. This commentary highlights the main challenges and barriers that the Deaf community faces in access to health care resources and psychological support during the COVID-19 pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).