Project description
A digital solution for children's speech skill assessment
Early intervention is the key to addressing any childhood developmental delay and speech and language development is an important building block. Delays in diagnosing speech delays can impact a child's educational, social, behavioural and mental health development. It is estimated that only 30 % of children get the intervention they require when they need it, leading to increased costs for healthcare and educational systems. SHARE is an EU-funded project delivering a digital health solution to ensure early intervention is a core part of all treatment plans. Through remote screening and innovative home-based supports, Kids Speech Labs is enabling national healthcare providers to ensure their limited pool of therapists can continue to deliver effective care to all children that need it.
Objective
Speech and language development is one of the most critical developmental phases in early childhood. Children with poor vocabulary skills at age 5 were four times more likely to have reading difficulties, three times as likely to have mental health problems, and twice as likely to be unemployed when they reached adulthood. Yet it’s one of the most overlooked industries in terms of innovation, the way speech and language development is managed by parents, teachers and healthcare providers has not changed in DECADES.
There is an over-reliance on the clinical speech and language therapists as the only means to get an assessment of a child’s speech and language skills. The result of this is children sitting on waiting lists or having early signs of delays missed, all resulting in missing out on reaching critical speech and language developmental milestones.
We are developing SHARE, a radical, data driven and digitally-delivered solution to address the problems in understanding children’s speech and language development. Delivering accurate, in-home assessment of speech skills is the key to disrupting this industry, empowering the other stakeholders in this story to understand when a child’s speech skills are on track and when they are not. Our goal is to reduce the over reliance on costly face to face therapy by developing solutions that don’t just replicate existing practice but are developed around data and evidence and reflect the abilities and lifestyles of families.
This is a relatively new market segment that crosses several markets and stakeholders across Speech therapy, Digital Health and the emerging New Mom Economy. We will use Women TechEU support to liaise with these stakeholders, develop commercial relations with them and build a regulatory compliance strategy for SHARE. All of these will be leveraged to get contact with and secure the investment needed to complete SHARE development and bring it to the market.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.2 - European innovation ecosystems Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-AG-LS - HORIZON Lump Sum GrantCoordinator
D16NW54 DUBLIN
Ireland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.