TalkBetter: family-driven mobile intervention care for children with language delay

Abstract

Language delay is a developmental problem of children who do not acquire language as expected for their chronological ages. Without timely intervention, language delay can act as a lifelong risk factor. Speech-language pathologists highlight that effective parent participation in everyday parent-child conversation is important to treat children's language delay. For effective roles, however, parents need to alter their own lifelong-established conversation habits, requiring extensive period of conscious effort and staying alert. In this paper, we present new opportunities for mobile and social computing to reinforce everyday parent-child conversation with therapeutic implications for children with language delays. Specifically, we propose TalkBetter, a mobile in-situ intervention service to help parents in daily parent-child conversation through real-time meta-linguistic analysis of ongoing conversations. Through extensive field studies with speech-language pathologists and parents, we report the multilateral motivations and implications of TalkBetter. We present our development of TalkBetter prototype and report its performance evaluation.