Abstract
The 2019 Coronavirus pandemic （COVID-19） has had a serious impact on speech therapy. As the virus can be transmitted by droplet infection, seeing clients on an outpatient basis was suspended for several months and even after face-to-face therapy was resumed, it is required to wear a mask or face-shield and to keep physical distance. It is quite difficult to perform articulation therapy without seeing or showing intraoral articulatory movement. This paper reports our experience with implementing telepractice using electropalatography （EPG）.
The subjects were four school-aged children with speech sound disorders due to cleft palate. Two of them were introduced to telepractice before COVID-19, because they could not see a speech therapist frequently as they lived in remote areas. For the other two subjects, telepractice was introduced after COVID-19. A portable EPG training unit （PTU: Articulate Assistant Ltd., Edinburgh） or a tablet type EPG （STARS: Asahi Roentgen Ltd., Kyoto） was lent out for home practice. Through the use of EPG, it was possible to monitor the child’s tongue-palate contact patterns remotely and also to show the typical patterns as an example. Telepractice was performed once a week for 30 minutes. After 10 to 30 sessions, their speech sound disorders were resolved and speech intelligibility was improved.
The combined use of EPG and telepractice seems to bring wider access to speech therapy for patients with speech sound disorders who have little opportunity to receive speech therapy for various reasons.
