Technology-Based Rehabilitation to Improve Communication after Acquired Brain Injury.

The utilization of technology has allowed for several advances in aphasia rehabilitation for individuals with acquired brain injury. Thirty-one previous studies that provide technology-based language or language and cognitive rehabilitation are examined in terms of the domains addressed, the types of treatments that were provided, details about the methods and the results, including which types of outcomes are reported. From this, we address questions about how different aspects of the delivery of treatment can influence rehabilitation outcomes, such as whether the treatment was standardized or tailored, whether the participants were prescribed homework or not, and whether intensity was varied.

Relationship between Self-Administered Cues and Rehabilitation Outcomes in Individuals with Aphasia: Understanding Individual Responsiveness to a Technology-Based Rehabilitation Program.

An advantage of rehabilitation administered on computers or tablets is that the tasks can be self-administered and the cueing required to complete the tasks can be monitored. Though there are many types of cueing, few studies have examined how participants' response to rehabilitation is influenced by self-administered cueing, which is cueing that is always available but the individual decides when and which cue to administer. In this study, participants received a tablet-based rehabilitation where the tasks were selfpaced and remotely monitored by a clinician.

Evaluating Treatment and Generalization Patterns of Two Theoretically Motivated Sentence Comprehension Therapies.

Purpose: The current study examined treatment outcomes and generalization patterns following 2 sentence comprehension therapies: object manipulation (OM) and sentence-to-picture matching (SPM). Findings were interpreted within the framework of specific deficit and resource reduction accounts, which were extended in order to examine the nature of generalization following treatment of sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia.

Method: Forty-eight individuals with aphasia were enrolled in 1 of 8 potential treatment assignments that varied by task (OM, SPM), complexity of trained sentences (complex, simple), and syntactic movement (noun phrase, wh-movement).

Effectiveness of an impairment-based individualized rehabilitation program using an iPad-based software platform.

The delivery of tablet-based rehabilitation for individuals with post-stroke aphasia is relatively new, therefore, this study examined the effectiveness of an iPad-based therapy to demonstrate improvement in specific therapy tasks and how the tasks affect overall language and cognitive skills. Fifty-one individuals with aphasia due to a stroke or traumatic brain injury (TBI) were recruited to use an iPad-based software platform, Constant Therapy, for a 10 week therapy program. Participants were split into an experimental (N = 42) and control (N = 9) group.