Telepractice and Digital Therapy Platforms for Speech and Hearing Rehabilitation: AI-Augmented Approaches and Future Directions

Abstract

The emergence of telepractice and online platforms has changed the delivery of speech and hearing rehabilitation, especially in scenarios of low clinical resource accessibility. The article under consideration discusses technology design, implementation, and assessment of AI-enhanced teletherapy tools to assist patients with communication disorders. We suggest a cloud-based system that will combine speech recognition, feedback in real-time, and custom therapy module that is complemented with deep learning algorithms. The system enables remote communication between clinicians and patients along with continuity of care in the form of adaptive therapy plans and progress of patients. The pilot programme involving both speech-language pathologists and patients showed that the adherence rate of therapy is higher and that patients showed lower dropout rates and high satisfaction with the programmes. The most important innovations involve the automated progress evaluation, noise-resilient speech recognition, and wearable gadgets to act as multimodal rehabilitation. Issues like internet connectivity, internet literacy and privacy concerns are also brought out with concern. The article concludes that telepractice with AI augmentations can greatly increase accessibility, cost, and scalability of the rehabilitation services. The future consists of hybrid approaches to online therapy, which include some face-to-face social work and digital therapy to support the client, combinations of multilingual therapy, and embedding them within the national healthcare framework to make them universal.