The creation and facilitation of speech and language therapy sessions for individuals with aphasia

Aphasia is the degradation of one's ability to comprehend or convey language, usually due to brain damage caused by strokes or some external force. Sufferers can regain some or all of their prior abilities, but only with significant speech and language therapy (SLT) sessions. SLT sessions are resourceintensive, as they often require skilled therapists to adapt the therapy for the individual patients. We present Ogma, a novel approach to the automatic creation of SLT sessions. Ogma is comprised of a proprietary mobile front-end application that the patients interact with, and an offline GA that designs patient-specific sessions based on a patient's progress. Key to this is the ability to accurately capture the difficulty of the generated sessions; this paper presents the results of experiments where SLT practitioners perform beta testing on Ogma, to ascertain its ability to consistently produce useful sessions of appropriate difficulty.