Overcoming Language Challenges is Difficult for Hard-of-Hearing Kids

Children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing continue to demonstrate a poor developmental profile with markedly low language ability relative to their cognitive potential and peers.

Technology Assisted Language Intervention (TALI) demonstrates that augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology can be utilized to provide visual supports for linguistic concepts and grammatically appropriate options. Voice output serves as a consistent model and mode of feedback for verbal expression, which are beneficial characteristics for a child who misses out on key aspects of language due to hearing loss.

Benchmarking and Secondary Research

We looked into existing materials for AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) to better understand what AAC materials are and their effectiveness and why it matters for TALI. We also benchmarked educational videos for inspiration for when we design the videos.

Patient and Clinicians Interview

To understand patient educational needs and pain points, we interviewed two speech pathologists and a family patient whose child is hard-of-hearing to gain important insights on how the TALI device and intervention are used and how the combination helped. We asked about common patient experiences with TALI, pain points, successes, usage, and adaptability of using the TALI device in different environments. This helped us gather topics for the family videos and guidebook.

• Speech pathologists find that they have to repeat the same information multiple times because many families fail to retain the information.

• Some families found that the TALI study improved their child’s auditory and visual skills, so they liked that the study helped multiple skills together.
   

• The family guide and the two videos are aimed to help families retain and understand the TALI program better.
   

• “Mainly, I just feel like we repeat ourselves a lot between patients.”

Personas and Scenario Role-play

We created persona groups to visualize the different types of patients and to understand their experiences and relationships with TALI. Additionally, we created our own empathy scenarios and role-played as a clinician and a patient and parent. This helps to create characters for the videos.

Character Sketches For Videos

Hannah and I benchmarked simple, visually-appealing character designs, styles, and colors that we could reference from for sketching. We sketched out characters to look vibrant, family-friendly, and easy-to-understand.

Final Storyboards

This scenario follows Sylvester and his father as they venture into the aquarium, helping Sylvester verbalize more as he is content and relaxed in his favorite environment. All storyboards are created by me.

Digital Assets and Style Guide

Family Guide

The family guide includes general information on what TALI is, goal-setting worksheets, and progress tracking to engage families with their hard-of-hearing child, with examples of scenarios of using TALI to help a hard-of-hearing child handle issues that come on with hearing loss. The materials are in a binder for easy portability and convenience for families.

Video: Encouraging Your Child To Communicate Using Language

The first video follows Sylvester as he ventures to the aquarium, his happy place, with his father to expand his vocabulary and motivate himself to verbalize more with language using the TALI device.

Video: Self-Monitoring and Repairing Mistakes

The second video follows Julie going to her grandmother’s house to spend a day in the garden and work on recognizing and correcting her language mistakes due to her hearing loss. She practices fixing her language mistakes with reminders to use her TALI device to continue fixing those mistakes.