Abstract

Speech disfluency is one of the kinds of speech disorders that can affect many aspects of a person’s life and surroundings. They may experience bad reactions to stuttering and counters difficulty to communicate especially in significant situations. However, speech therapists may conduct speech therapy sessions as it is believed that through speech practice, stutterers can recover well and speaks fluently (each individual’s progress might be different to one another). Recently, mobile applications (apps) to improve health especially in speech disfluencies are proliferating. However, before a doctor or speech therapist can recommend any stuttering apps to their patients, they need to have the clinical test evidence of the apps and be confident that the apps are capable in improving patients’ speech disfluencies. Recently, speech therapists have started to ask the effectiveness of mobile health (m-health) apps towards improving speech problems and stuttering issues among society. Unfortunately, studies have revealed that most of stuttering m-health apps in the market were developed without any proper guideline from health practitioner. The main instruments used in this study are through the adaptation of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework and Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering (OASES) instrument. ICF provides an ideal framework for describing stuttering while OASES instrument provides validity assessment and scoring procedure in offering evidence for the treatment used (usage of stuttering m-health apps and its impact on patient’s speech problems). Through this effort, it is hoped that the widespread use of m-health apps (i.e. focusing on speech disfluency for this study) developed with proper clinical guidance will enhance the quality of stuttering m-health apps thus leading towards quality healthcare in our society.

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