JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Communication is a human right, despite this, children with cerebral palsy and dysarthria experience constraints due to their physical disability, affecting their opportunity to reach their full potential and ability to fully participate in play, school, and socialising. For many, their challenge to produce clear speech that can be understood, is interpreted by others as an intellectual impairment. Children with moderate-severe speech impairments, such as dysarthria often rely on technology solutions, which can translate text or symbols to speech manually or using a single binary switch. Using a switch requires the child to scan through a hierarchy of command menus to find the letter or word they need. This is time consuming, arduous and 15 to 20 times slower than normal speech. Technology innovations, developed via high-quality datasets of audio-video samples of dysarthric speech hold the key to build personalized speech recognition algorithms that allow us to bridge this gap.

Objective:

My Voice Library is a repository of high-quality audio and visual datasets of children, living in Australia, with cerebral palsy who have dysarthria. The children are presented gamified modules based on words and sentences from the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessments 2 to allow speech and language therapists, engineers and programmers to develop personalised speech recognition approaches to enable personalised real-time communication.

Methods:

Our ethics and consenting process enables the participants (8-18 years) to choose if they want their information to be used for personalised research in addition to general research. The study has been approved by the University of Sydney’s Human Research Ethics Committee (2023/263). Caregivers to the participants provide written informed consent. The results will be disseminated through contributions to international conferences and scientific journals, and they will also be included in students’ theses.

Results:

National Health and Medical Research Council (NHRMC) funded April 2021, Data collection commenced March 2024, as of April 2026, 13/99 participants recruited as of submission of the manuscript. Preliminary data analysis to commence in 2026. Results of the preliminary analysis expected to be published 2027 and full results expected to be published once 99 participants have been successfully recruited.

Conclusions:

My Voice Library embeds high-quality voice and video data assessments through gamified modules based on the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessments 2 and was designed in partnership with an active patient and public involvement advisory group. My Voice Library and associated information governance will facilitate research use of real-world data where ethical approval and consent is given. My Voice Library enables the collection of voice data in controlled yet naturalistic environments for children, enhancing the clinical relevance and quality of the dataset. The modular and gamified design promotes sustained participant engagement, reducing fatigue and increasing the quantity and diversity of data collected.