Advances in Medical Research
Open Access
ISSN: 2564-8942
+44 1478 350008
ISSN: 2564-8942
+44 1478 350008
Sara Massa
Speech Therapist in USL Toscana Centro, Italy
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: Advances in Medical Research
The health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has led speech therapists to take advantage of remote- modality rehabilitations in order to continue their therapies. While direct treatment still represents the preferred option, the emergency situation has required important adaptation by the therapists in order to continue their professional activities. In this sense telerehabilitation has been keen to offering therapeutic continuity to many patients. Teach and touch is an example of a professional app created to support rehabilitation of children with Language Disorders. It is also a useful tool to promoting languagerelated skills both when used during the online rehabilitation with the speech therapist themselves, and at home with the care-giver. Through digital play activities, the child is driven to face his/her own fragilities related to diverse linguistic areas. In fact, Teach and Touch consists of different rehabilitation games that can be adapted to the child’s needs. For its full efficacy, the therapeutic alliance between families and speech therapist is of the outmost importance. In fact, the App features pre-defined therapeutical games that can be customized according to the child’s linguistic difficulties ; in this way the device facilitates parents’ involvement and, consequently, a therapeutic continuity for the child. The games featured by Teach and Touch aim at promoting syntactic and morphological development and refer to a theoretical- rehabilitation model: each rehabilitation game corresponds to a specific linguistic purpose that the speech therapist can
Recent Publications
1. H. Lynn Horne-Moyer, 2014 . The use of electronic games in therapy: a review with clinical implications 10.1007/s11920- 014- 0520-6
2. Pizzuto E, Caselli MC 1992, The acquisition of Italian morphology: implications for models of language development 10.1017/ s0305000900011557
3. Moscati, Rizzi, Vottari, Chilosi, Salvadorini, Guasti 2020. Morphosyntactic weaknesses in Developmental Language Disorder: the role of structure and agreement configurations 10.1017/ S0305000919000709
4. Bottari P, Cipriani P, Chilosi AM, Pfanner L. 2001. The italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia 10.1006/brln.2000.2402
5. Kollia B, Tsiamtsiouris J. 2021. Influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on telepractice in speech-language pathology 10.1080/10852352.2021.1908210
6. D. Parisi 2010 Robots with language 10.3389/fnbot.2010.00010
7. Sansavini A, et al.2021 Developmental Language Disorder: Early Predictors, Age for the Diagnosis, and Diagnostic Tools. A Scoping Review 10.3390/brainsci11050654
Sara works at the Sesto Fiorentino ASL (Florence) and has more than 13 years’ experience as rehabilitation logopedist in the pediatric field. She graduated with honors from the Luigi Vanvitelli University of Campania in Naples in 2009. Her expertise ranges from childhood hearing loss to Language Disorders and Dyspraxias with I and II level training of the Prompt method Over the past two years Sara worked at the Meyer Pediatric Hospital in Florence and has been a member of the S.I.F.E.L. Board of Directors (2018 to 2021). Sara is the creator of Teach and touch, the app supporting speech therapists treating morphosyntactic skills.