TalkLIME: mobile system intervention to improve parent-child interaction for children with language delay

Abstract

Parent-training is commonly used to support intervention of children with language delay. Unfortunately, parents find it difficult to apply the training to their child in everyday life and often give up on their parent-child interaction. In this work, we propose and evaluate TalkLIME -- a mobile system that provides real-time feedback to improve the parent-child interaction and reinforce parent-training intervention. We first conduct a survey to understand parents' feedback preference for the mobile system and determine that a non-invasive feedback using the mobile phones screen is preferable. TalkLIME was developed to provide real-time feedback through the mobile phone screen while also providing motivation to the parents to consistently continue parent-child interaction through both short-term and long-term goals. A six-weeks user study was conducted with eight parents and their children with language delay. Our results show that the experimental group who used TalkLIME showed a significant improvement in the child's initiation ratio, an important metric in the language development of children.