Telerehabilitation as an add-on to face-to-face speech and language therapy
Project Members: Pascal Reuse, Matthias Hutter, René Vielgut, Stephan Gerber, Monica Koenig-Bruhin, Corina Wyss, Sandra Schaller, Thomas Nyfeller, René Müri, Tobias Nef, Prabitha Urwyler
Project Start: 2015
Project Funding: Gottfried und Julia Bangerter-Rhyner-Stiftung, UniBE ID grant, Innosuisse

To this end, an aphasia tele-rehabilitation application (Bern Aphasia App) was developed within a multidisciplinary team of speech and language therapists, neurologists, psychologists and computer engineers. With this application patients can train independently and the therapists still have access to the patients' performance and can select exercise types and adjust the difficulty level.
The aim of this project is to investigate the effects of high-frequency short duration tablet-based SLT in chronic stroke outpatients in a clinical trial.
With tablet-based applications both patients and therapists can benefit from an intuitive, touch-based reliable product which fits well with the current trend of moving health treatment from hospital to home.
Keywords: Aphasia, language therapy, stroke
Publications:
Gerber SM, Schütz N, Uslu AS, Schmidt N, Röthlisberger C, Wyss P, Perny S, Wyss C, Koenig-Brühin M, Urwyler P, Nyffeler T, Marchal-Crespo L, Mosimann UP, Müri RM, Nef T (2019). Therapist-Guided Tablet-Based Telerehabilitation for Patients with Aphasia: Proof-of-Concept and Usability Study, JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies, 6(1) e13163 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/13163