Group therapy as a social context for aphasia recovery: a pilot, observational study in an acute rehabilitation hospital.

Background: Individuals with aphasia often receive therapy from a speech-language pathologist during acute rehabilitation. The literature demonstrates that group-based therapy provides a natural, social environment for language rehabilitation in mild-moderate and/or chronic aphasia; however, the communication of persons with acute, severe non-fluent aphasia during group treatment has not been fully explored.

Objective: This observational study investigated patient communication during acute rehabilitation.

The effect of videoconference-based telerehabilitation on story retelling performance by brain-injured subjects and its implications for remote speech-language therapy.

This paper presents results from a study conducted at the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Telerehabilitation at the National Rehabilitation Hospital. The study was designed to measure performance by brain-injured subjects, with medical diagnoses of stroke or traumatic brain injury, on a standardized Speech-Language Pathology evaluation conducted in both face-to-face and videoconference-based telerehabilitation settings. The Story Retelling Procedure (SRP), which measures connected language production and comprehension of spoken narratives, was administered to each subject in both settings.