Measuring and monitoring emotional changes in children who stutter

Abstract

The assessment of clients with speech disorders presents challenges for speech-language pathologists. For example, having a reliable way of measuring the severity of the case, determining which remedial program is aligned with a patient's needs, and measuring of treatment processes. There is potential for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications to enhance speech therapy sessions by providing objective insights and real-time visualization of brain activity during the sessions. This paper presents a study on emotional state detection during speech pathology. The goal of this study is to investigate affective-motivational brain responses to stimuli in children who stutter. To this end, we conducted an experiment that involved recording frontal electroencephalography (EEG) activity from fifteen children with stuttering whilst they looked at visual stimuli. The contribution of our study is to provide a comprehensive background and a framework for emotional state detection experiments as assessment and monitoring tool in speech pathology. It mainly discusses the feasibility and potential benefits of applying EEG-based emotion detection in speech-language therapy contexts of use. The findings of our research indicate that emotional recognition using non-invasive EEG-based BCI system is sufficient to differentiate between affective states of individuals in treatment contexts.

Keywords: Brain-computer interface; EEG-Based emotion detection; Frontal EEG asymmetry; Monitoring; Stutter.