sPeAK-MAN: Towards popular gameplay for speech therapy

Current speech therapy treatments are not easily accessible to the general public due to cost and demand. Therapy sessions are also laborious and maintaining motivation of patients is hard. We propose using popular games and speech recognition technology for speech therapy in an individualised and accessible manner. sPeAK-MAN is a Pac-Man-like game with a core gameplay mechanic that incorporates vocalisation of words generated from a pool commonly used in clinical speech therapy sessions. Other than improving engagement, sPeAK-MAN aims to provide real-time feedback on the vocalisation performance of patients. It also serves as an initial prototype to demonstrate the possibilities of using familiar popular gameplay (instead of building one from scratch) for rehabilitation purposes. Copyright © 2013 ACM