1. Consistent long-term practice leads to consistent improvement: Benefits of self-managed therapy for language and cognitive deficits using a digital therapeutic
- Author
-
Liu, Hantian, Cordella, Claire, Ishwar, Prakash, Betke, Margrit, and Kiran, Swathi
- Subjects
Biomedical Engineering ,Medicine (miscellaneous) ,Health Informatics ,Computer Science Applications - Abstract
BackgroundAlthough speech-language therapy (SLT) is proven to be beneficial to recovery of post-stroke aphasia, delivering sufficiently high amounts of dosage remains a problem in real-world clinical practice. Self-managed SLT was introduced to solve the problem. Previous research showed in a 10-week period, increased dosage frequency could lead to better performance, however, it is uncertain if dosage still affects performance over a longer period of practice time and whether gains can be seen following practice over several months.ObjectiveThis study aims to evaluate data from a health app (Constant Therapy) to investigate the relationship between dosage amount and improvements following a 30-week treatment period. Two cohorts of users were analyzed. One was comprised of patients with a consistent average weekly dosage amount and the other cohort was comprised of users whose practice had higher variability.MethodsWe conducted two analyses with two cohorts of post-stroke patients who used Constant Therapy. The first cohort contains 537 “consistent” users, while the second cohort contains 2,159. The 30-week practice period was split into three consecutive 10-week practice windows to calculate average dosage amount. In each 10-week practice period, patients were grouped by their average dosage into low (0–15 min/week), medium (15–40 min/week) and moderate dosage (greater than 40 min/week) groups. Linear mixed-effects models were employed to evaluate if dosage amount was a significant factor affecting performance. Pairwise comparison was also applied to evaluate the slope difference between groups.ResultsFor the consistent cohort, medium (β = .002, t17,700 = 7.64, P β = .003, t9,297 = 7.94, P β = .001, t = 1.76, P = .078).ConclusionsThis study showed a higher dosage amount is related to greater therapy outcomes in over 6 months of digital self-managed therapy. It also showed that regardless of the exact pattern of practice, self-managed SLT leads to significant and sustained performance gains.
- Published
- 2023