Development of Serious Games for Vocal Training in Speech Therapy

Abstract

Serious games provide fun entertainment while supporting learning and skill development. Serious games have been used for supporting education, military training, and health treatment. Communication disorders including speech, language, and hearing disorders are considered high-incidence impairment, occurring in 10% of people. Particularly, 1.4% of children and 7.6% of adults have voice disorders, resulting in a significant need of speech therapy. Compared to traditional speech therapy, serious games can help to maintain patients’ motivation and commitment. This study was intended to: (1) identify needs and game development strategies of vocal training games to support speech therapy for people with speech disorders by literature review, stakeholder needs survey, and benchmarking, (2) develop a motivating and effective program (“Smart Speech”) consisting of various serious games for vocal training as a part of speech therapy by implementing the identified game development strategy, and (3) evaluate the proposed vocal training program (“Smart Speech”) by conducting absolute and relative assessments. The developed vocal training program consists of voice continuity, loudness, and pitch categories with five games each to keep patients’ interest during training. Gamification factors such as difficulty level and score were used to challenge patients in the developed vocal training program. Therapists can determine customized values of variables such as duration, repetition, target loudness and pitch levels of a game according to patients’ capabilities and disorder severity levels. The developed vocal training program was evaluated by 20 therapists. From the absolute assessment result, visual aesthetics (5.3 ± 1.0), usability (5.2 ± 1.1), personal gratification (5.2 ± 0.9), customization (5.2 ± 0.9), accuracy (5.1 ± 0.9) are the strenghts of Smart Speech, while play engrossment (4.5 ± 0.9), social connectivity (4.5 ± 1.1), and creative freedom (4.4 ± 1.0) are features to be improved. From the relative assessment result, Smart Speech is better than existing games in all scales, especially customization (5.5 ± 0.8), visual aesthetics (5.2 ± 1.1), narratives (5.2 ± 1.3), accuracy (5.2 ± 1.1), personal gratification (5.1 ± 1.2), and usability (5.1 ± 1.0). Therapists like the customization, various content (narratives), clarity of game rules (usability), and appealing graphics (visual aesthetics) of the games and considered the developed program is able to increase the interest of its users, especially children.