An educative environment based on ontologies and e-learning for training on design of speech-language therapy plans for children with disabilities and communication disorders

Abstract

Nowadays several developing countries must to face several problems related with the lack of personnel, resources or adequate health-care structures to attend children with disabilities and communication disorders. Some studies of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other organizations point that in some countries of Africa exists one Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) per each 2 to 4 million people, whereas in developed countries like United States or Australia the ratio is much higher: One SLP per each 2500 to 4700 people. For these reasons, in this paper we propose an intelligent educative environment aimed to support the training and development of practice skills of the future SLPs. Our proposal relies on ontologies and several e-learning modules and at the moment is able to support the learning process of designing therapy plans. Currently, the ontology that we have designed contains more than 1,005 instances and two tests to evaluate the articulation, and hearing skills on children.