The SWAN team is made up of UCL researchers and digital game developers. We have experience in speech and language therapy, and psychology, as well as experience in building computer games. Our work is based in the UCL Communication Clinic where people with aphasia gave us the original idea for the SWAN game. Playing a computer game could make numbers enjoyable, and could improve number skills. We used our experience in research to design a game that would be easy for people with aphasia to use. We showed our ideas to computer game specialists, and now a company called SoftV is part of the SWAN team. We have worked together to build the game and SoftV’s experts have created beautiful graphics, which make the game enjoyable to play. At each stage of the research we are getting valuable advice from a group of speech and language therapists, an educational consultant, parents, individuals with aphasia and other researchers.
A game-based digital intervention to rebuild number skills in aphasia
In our talk, we will describe our work exploring whether a digital intervention called ‘SWAN’ helps adults with aphasia improve their number skills. The study also tests the ways in which we carry out our therapy and the methods we use to measure change. This will increase our understanding of how to support relearning of number skills and tell us whether better test scores are matched by improved performance in daily life tasks using numbers. You can view a written version of this talk here.
