Founders: Yun Bing, Dr. Dongli Li, Dr. Dongli Li Dr. Andre Hallack
 

The Problem

Over 80 million people worldwide suffer from speech and language impairment, including stroke survivors and people with Parkinson’s and TBI. The standard treatment is continuous speech therapy with therapists and daily home training of minimum 45 minutes. However, this not only overwhelms the public health services, but also poses heavy financial burdens on the household, resulting in limited access for most patients. Although most speech therapists are working towards their full capacity, current speech therapy tends to be delivered inefficiently and subjectively, making it difficult to fulfil the potential of the treatment. They seldom have access to technologies that assist them with analysis or training, whereas the available quantitative tools are cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive to use. Additionally, home training, a key part of speech therapy, is often not well performed. Patients are less compliant with home exercises due to its unengaging and unsupervised nature, which greatly limits treatment outcomes.

The Solution

Beautiful Voice is a digital health platform that provides effective at-home speech therapy solutions for both patients and therapists. Powered by our cutting-edge Python API, Beautiful Voice is capable of comprehensive speech and voice analyses. Acting as a personal coach at home, it helps the patients to understand where the weaknesses are in their speech and guides them through personalised targeted training. Utilising instantaneous biofeedback, we deliver interest-based interactive exercises for patients, making their home training fun and effective. We also provide easy-to-use quantitative assessment and monitoring for speech therapists, helping them deliver quantifiable sessions remotely and more effectively, ultimately enhancing their treatment outcomes.

The Company 

We have been working in the field of stroke and Parkinson’s. While talking to people with these conditions, we saw how debilitating their speech and voice issues are in their daily lives, how little treatment they receive and how they wish to have more affordable therapy options. When we interviewed speech therapists to understand the story on the other side, we realised that they also need help – it’s difficult for therapists to quantify the patients’ speech and voice condition and showcase their improvement; it is also difficult to keep the patients compliant with their home exercises in the absence of therapists. All these factors contribute to a slower recovery. Luckily many of these issues can be addressed by modern technologies, so we decided to use our engineering skills to bring speech therapy to the 21st century.

A Quote

"It has been wonderful participating in the Tata Varsity Pitch Competition. It provided us with great exposure to a wide range of audiences and it was good to hear about projects from other talented peers."

Top Tips

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