The way children's speech and language development is managed has not radically changed in decades, despite the increases in demand from parents and advances in technology. Parents worry about all aspects of their child's development, and speech and language is particularly difficult for parents to assess and understand if their child is on track for their age. Parents ask primary care providers, creche professionals and teachers but these professionals have reported that they don't have the training or time to adequately help parents and so parents are overloading the speech and language therapy clinical systems. The current system is heavily reliant on face to face approach and this is leading to long waiting lists in the public sector and high costs in the private sector. Many families are forced to spend money they don't have on private therapy because they cannot get the support they need on public systems.
There are no tools for parents to understand if their child's speech is on track for their age or clinically validated remote tools that allow parents to intervene in the early stages of speech development. Early identification and intervention are universally agreed to be the critical factor in addressing many childhood developmental delays. When speech and language delays are missed in early ages, it can takes 2-4 times as long for issues to be addressed when they are identified at age 7 compared to addressing them at age 4.
Kids Speech Labs is developing the first automated, clinically validated, digital health platform for children’s speech and language skills. Our goal is to move the early stages of monitoring and assessing this critical developmental phase into the home to improve early identification and intervention for speech and language delays. By empowering parents with reliable solutions we can reduce the number of families entering the clinical system and support those families who need long term intervention.
