A Novel Gamified Approach for Collecting Speech Data from Young Children with Dysarthria: Feasibility and Positive Engagement Evaluation

Dysarthria is a common and treatable speech problem in children, and computer-assisted speech therapy is a promising way for children's speech therapy. However, data collection poses a significant challenge for computer-assisted therapy, especially when it comes to gathering speech data from young children, particularly those with dysarthria. Finding a better way to collect young children's speech data is, therefore, an urgent need. This paper prompted a gamified speech collection method and carried out an experiment to compare the participation time, error rate, and collection efficiency with the gamified method and with a traditional method where adults are imitated. Moreover, we also explore whether the gamified collection methods increase the children's positive engagement. A feasibility study including 10 children with dysarthria and 10 children without speech problems was conducted. Their participation duration, number of spoken utterances, number of mispronunciation utterances, and a questionnaire about children's engagement attitude were recorded. The findings indicate that the gamified collecting method reduces pronunciation mistake rates in children with dysarthria while also increasing their engagement to participate.