ARTICULATE INSTRUMENTS LTD

Articulate Instruments designs and manufactures instrumentation for measuring the way we speak. We offer software to speech pathologists, speech therapists and other speech professionals to aid in the diagnosis, assessment and remediation of speech disorders. One potentially valuable diagnostic and speech therapy procedure for articulation disorders is electropalatography (EPG). EPG records details of the location and timing of tongue contacts with the hard palate during speech. EPG records alv... eolar, post-alveolar, palatal, and velar placement, and registers characteristic patterns for many consonants and vowels that occur in English, making it a useful technique for investigating a wide range of speech targets. EPG also has a facility to provide real-time visual feedback of tongue-palate contacts, which can be used to monitor articulation as part of a speech therapy programme. EPG is now relatively well-established as a clinical tool, and has been used successfully for articulation disorders such as those associated with developmental and acquired conditions such as dyspraxia, dysarthria, cleft palate and other craniofacial abnormalities, downs syndrome and hearing impairment. Our current focus is on the use of ultrasound for visualising tongue movements. Ultrasound is convenient and the cost has reduced in recent years so that it is directly comparable with EPG. We feel this technology has a lot to offer the clinician and we are working to develop image processing specifically for this application. Our therapy devices are designed in consultation with speech pathologists and clinical linguists and incorporate the latest developments in instrumental clinical assessment and intervention.More