Following written instructions

Speechify is a text to speech tool. It can be used to read aloud any typed text: messages, social media, e-books, PDF's, or photograph text to read pages from books, magazines and other text

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Web based suite of exercises designed for cognitive rehabilitation.  Each activity has 2-5 levels of difficulty.

Language activities:

Auditory comprehension (true/fase) tasks, including some very high level activities

Written sequencing tasks where the user is required to put steps for an activity in order (3-16 steps, depending on the level)

Picture-adjective; picture-noun and picture-verb matching activities, including some very high level tasks

Functional, object-location matching tasks

Language based executive functioning activities:

Written decision-making tasks 

Written reasoning of consquences tasks

There are also social cognition tasks including inferring facial expressions & inferring emotional reactions 

Error handling: none

Prompts/cues: none

Record results: yes, and they can be accessed remotely

Free trial: yes, a 10 day trial is available

Comments: Latency is measured for most exercises.  Although a large number of rehab areas are listed, some contain no activities (e.g. expression, naming, fluency, writing). Although reading activities are listed, it is simply matching digits to written numbers. Alot of the exercises rely on very good reading comprehension (e.g. decision making, time estimation, reasoning of consequences, task sequencing). On some activities, the user is unable to amend their response before submitting it (e.g. on task sequencing exercises). 

Suppliers: https://www.neuronup.com/en

Work on answering questions with help

Questions on current affairs, updated weekly

Work on asking questions and social phrases

Work on people’s names with video and spelling practice

Spelling with sounds

Letter spelling

Rhyme judgement

Reading tasks

Matching tasks

Sentence processing (e.g reversible sentence ordering)

Written & spoken sentence building

Semantic associations

Tasks for working on verbs in a sentence context

Conversation starters

Articulation: 5000+ videos of target words and phrases, including breakdown into individual syllables & phonemes

Features a communication props drawer with maps, drawing board, numbers, time 

Multiple ways to create hierarchies (e.g. according to word length, sound, frequency, number of phonemes)

Video tutorials are provided to demonstrate how the app works & each exercise has its own tutorial to demonstrate how to complete the exercises

Can create multiple therapy sessions and can share sessions over internet

Error handling: Wrong answers are removed; the response is read aloud for the user to judge;  contextual information is given

Prompts/cues: Closure cues; spoken word

Record results: Results are shown after the session with % of items completed correctly. Can request additional details about accuracy, speed and help requested. Results can also be emailed to the clinician.

Option to break up sentence level questions into chunks to support reading and listening

Comments:  

• Can choose option for items to remain on the screen until the user moves onto the next exercise (i.e. no automatic scrolling onto the next item).  This is useful when used in therapy to discuss the user’s response
• Advanced settings for SLT to designate exercise features for each exercise set
• Remote management/allocation of exercises and results

Free version, monthly subscription option, 1 & 3 year subscription options

Supplier: Tactus

Exercises for following written and spoken multi-step instructions with 100 stimuli items

Choose from 2-6 information carrying words

Features worked on include size, colour, before, after, first, then

There are preliminary exercises to check the person has understood all the concepts, before moving onto the full exercises

Results can be emailed or consulted in-app

No prompts/cues are provided

Writing exercises:

• Copying letters & words
• Written picture naming
• Complete the phrase (spell a word to complete a saying)
• Sentence scramble (re-arranging words to form a short sentence)

Speaking exercises:

• Articulation & oro-motor exercises
• Functional spoken word & phrase repetition
• Flashcard naming (spoken picture naming of nouns, verbs & adjectives)
• Naming using semantic feature analysis strategies

Reading exercises:

• Letter, word and phrase matching
• Written word/sentence to picture matching
• Written word sentence completion
• Article reading based around current news topics

Listening exercises:

• Spoken word to picture matching
• Spoken phrase to picture matching
• Spoken question to picture matching
• Following auditory directions

There is also a large bank of memory, semantic categorisation & maths exercises 

There is also a large bank of ADL exercises (e.g. reading menus, reading product labels, telling the time and reading calendar entries).

The memory and ADL exercises also work on various language areas e.g. auditory memory, functional reading, semantics, auditory comprehension and inferences.

Error handling: Yes

Prompts/cues: Yes

Record results: Yes, very detailed, specifying which cues were required, which answer was chosen, how long the task took to complete and dates tasks were attempted

Comments/N.B

• There is only one version for UK, US, Aus

• 3-4 levels of difficulty, depending on exercises

• Very large bank of over 13,500 items

• Reliant on the user self monitoring and knowing whether they named the item correctly or not.

There is no facility for recording speech attempts and the app itself does not determine level of accuracy. This app would therefore not be appropriate for independent use by someone with poor self monitoring

• FREE TRIAL available

Type of exercises & brief description    

• Auditory memory and basic sequencing with adjectives.
• Can also be used for reading comprehension of adjectives and position.
• A verbal and/or written description is given (e.g. the red one is bigger than the green one), user must select the corresponding picture from a choice of 12.
• 60 items in total

Error handling: None

Prompts/cues: None

Comments/N.B

• American accent

Type of exercises:

• Following written instructions to place shapes. 1-3 step instructions.
• Also sequencing exercises with shapes and written memory to a degree

Developed with SLT: Yes

Theory based: No

Record own speaking attempts: N/A

Correction of own speaking attempts: N/A

Customisation/personalisation: No

Error handling: None

Prompts/cues given: No

Tutorials: No

Free trial: Yes

Support: Free lifetime technical support via phone, email or online livechat

Comments:

• More for work on prepositions and sequencing than direction following
• Can change colours to aid visual difficulties
• Can remove written direction to work on written memory skills too

N.B:
   Need very good sentence level reading
 

Type of exercises:

• Category discrimination & reasoning (semantics)
• Category naming & completion (semantics)
• Cause & effect (what would happen if…)
• Conditional statements (if X then Y…)
• Deductive reasoning (semantics)
• Form & function (semantics)
• Inferential naming (semantics)
• Logical thinking
• Problem solving (pragmatics)
• Reasons why (pragmatics)
• Situation Reasoning (pragmatics)
• Things in common (semantics)

Access: Mouse for all exercises except inferential naming which also requires keyboard

Developed with SLT: Yes

Theory based: No, based on clinician experience

Record own speaking attempts: N/A

Correction of own speaking attempts: N/A

Easy to use? No. The user must click on an answer, then click again to input their answer and then click again to move onto the next question.

The internet subscription exercises are very slow to accept the answer making multiple activations possible and therefore potentially confusing.

Customisation/personalisation: No

Error handling: None

Prompts/cues given: None

Tutorials: Yes

Free trial: Yes but not the complete program

Support: Via Livechat. The suppliers can also log onto the user’s computer. Support takes place 9am-5pm New York time

Comments:

• The online subscription allows access to all the modules available so as the user progresses they don’t need to purchase new modules. It feels like an app when downloaded on an ipad
• The CD version has more functions than the internet subscription version
• A download version exists for $19.95 per program but works only on Windows, not mac
• The pragmatics exercises are aimed at ‘what if’ scenarios
• Remote access to results is possible as long as the SLT has the user’s login & password.

N.B:
    US terminology
    Voice is American and computer generated
    Need single word/simple sentence level reading or good auditory comprehension to complete the tasks
    US terminology & vocabulary
    No visual rewards for correct answers