Development of an android application in kannada to enhance picture naming skills in persons with aphasia

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability in India, and the prevalence of this disorder shows a steep rise in the recent decades. Among the many consequences of stroke, the loss of the ability to use language - i.e., aphasia - is a major detriment to the quality of life of the affected individuals. In the recent past, the rise of modeldriven treatment approaches has shown promising effects in persons with aphasia. Two such techniques to enhance naming are the Semantic Feature Analysis and Phonological Component Analysis techniques. These two techniques focus on entirely different constructs in language. The first one focuses on the semantic or conceptual training, whereas, the second focuses on the sound-based training in patients with naming difficulties after stroke-Aphasia. Despite the availability of such effective techniques, a major constraint is the availability of trained personnel to provide such training to the needy persons who reside far from the clinical facilities. Present day technological advances may fill this lacuna. Method: Preparation of training set by using phonological component analysis technique for naming considering psycholinguistic properties such as familiarity and imagibility of words was done. A set of 150 words was subjected for rating by nine individuals. Considering the best rating among these raters, the final 100 set was selected for training items in android platform. The android application was developed (MAT-APP naming module one) using Android Studio for designing the user interface. MySQL is used as the backend database. To ensure monitoring of patient performance the MAT-APP has an interface with a web application. Results: We expect that android application considering theoretical aspects of language processing can provide a potential value in distant rehabilitation and also better service delivery in various problems mentioned in literature.