Development of the Auditory-Perceptual Assessment for Dysarthria: The Dysarthria Assessment System (DAS)

Background and Objectives: Dysarthria is a significant motor speech disorder that arises from damage to the central or peripheral nervous system. This damage can result in paralysis and weakness of the muscles responsible for articulation, which negatively affects the speech production process. The objective of this study is to develop a Dysarthria Assessment System (DAS) for the auditory-perceptual evaluation of patients with dysarthria. Method: We conducted an analysis of assessment areas and tasks based on literature published after 2000. This analysis guided the development of assessment content, which was subsequently organized for integration into a web platform. Results: The DAS consists of three main components: Speech Mechanism, Speech, and Speech Motor. The Speech Mechanism component includes questions aimed at assessing the symmetry, range of motion, and strength of the articulatory organs involved in speech production, with items presented separately for rest and activity. The Speech component evaluates respiration, phonation, resonance, articulation, and prosody through tasks such as maximum phonation time, paragraph reading, and picture description. In the Speech Motor component, the system measures the frequency of alternating motion rates and sequential motion rates. Conclusions: The DAS developed in this study is expected to be highly beneficial in clinical practice due to its ability to visualize and automatically calculate results, enabling assessments to be conducted via PC or tablet. Future research will focus on standardizing the DAS through large-scale data collection.