Dizzying heights for Dyscover - Tae's tandem 🪂

We at UTILISE are excited (and nervous) to tell you all that our fantastic intern, Tae Horsfield, will be jumping from a plane, 10,000ft above the ground, in just over a month to raise money for aphasia charity Dyscover!

Tae is a wonderful person, who always puts others before herself. In her greatest feat of selflessness yet, she has taken on the challenge of a parachute jump, despite being terrified of heights, to bring support to a great cause. Tae has been volunteering for Dyscover, a charity that supports people living with aphasia, for several months. Daily sessions are run by speech and language therapists and volunteers, to provide for support for people living with aphasia as well as their family, friends and carers. They help people to develop their own communication strategies that work for them, and create a sense of community for people who often report feeling isolated as a result of their difficulties with speech, language and communication.

In Tae’s own words:

“One thing I can say is every member at Dyscover I have had the pleasure of meeting is determined to participate in all activities. I hope that I will be able to be as positive, courageous, and determined as the members at Dyscover when I jump out of the plane”.

The UTILISE team will be wishing Tae good weather and good luck on the 27th of July, with our feet planted firmly on the ground! To find out more, visit Tae’s fundraising page here.

Kerry Corley on UTILISE self-managed therapy

We are hugely grateful to the Stroke Association for funding our ongoing research into post-stroke aphasia.

The UTILISE project has been developed with the aim of improving people with aphasia’s ability to produce and understand every-day sentences. We are about to take the exciting next step in our project journey, which involves lending people an iPad that they can use to access our therapy at home. Our work with Therapy Box has made it possible for us to build a version of our therapy which people can use remotely, meaning there is less travel commitment, less expense, and opportunity for people to spend more time doing therapy exercises from the comfort of their own sofa.

We are thrilled to share this Stroke Association video with you, in which our UTILISE PhD researcher, Kerry Corley, explains more about why she is part of UTILISE, and the work that we do. Professor Rosemary Varley, our project lead, and Tony, an individual with aphasia, also talk about why this research is so important.

The Stroke Association would not be able to fund such valuable work without the contributions of donors and the public. To make a donation to the Stroke Association, click here.

Thank you so much to everyone who supports our work!

Stroke Association Amazing Brains 2023

Jason Parker, stroke survivor, sharing his experience of struggling with mental health after his stroke.

Rosemary, Kerry and Fern from the UTILISE team were very excited to attend the Amazing Brains 2023 event last week, hosted by the Stroke Association.

Kerry Corley and Fern Rodgers from the UTILISE project, in front of Kerry’s award recognition screen, which reads: “I am excited to have a part to play in increasing our knowledge of self-directed computer therapies [for aphasia']. They have a key role in the future of stroke rehabilitation as a leap forward in the amount of therapy people with post-stroke difficulties can access.”

The event centred around the hugely important topic of mental health after stroke. After a significant, life changing event, like a stroke, it is common for people to struggle with feelings of anxiety, depression or anger. This is even more common in people with post-stroke aphasia, many of whom report feelings of isolation, loneliness and loss of confidence. Jason Parker gave a moving and inspirational speech about his first-hand experiences of working through mental health difficulties following his stroke, and how his determination helped him to deal with this experience and get him back to work.

Professor Mark Tarrant, Professor Maggie Lawrence, and Dr Emma Patchwood then spoke about their Stroke Association funded research into post-stroke mental health and the ways in which they are working to reduce the emotional burden experienced by many stroke survivors.

Kerry Corley, Fern Rodgers and Professor Rosemary Varley at Amazing Brains 2023.

We would like to thank the Stroke Association for running such a fantastic event, and for funding the UTILISE research project. We were also thrilled to celebrate our team’s recent funding success too, with Kerry Corley working towards her PhD and Dr Claudia Bruns commencing her post-doctoral fellowship. Without this funding, our work to help people living with aphasia after stroke would not be possible. Difficulty communicating can impact quality of life, and we hope to help.

If you are struggling with your mental health following a stroke, you are not alone. You can visit this webpage for more information, or, you can call the Samaritans on 116 123.

Spring 2023 at UTILISE

It’s 2023! What have we been working on? 

Time for an update from the UTILISE team. We have been working hard over the past few months…

UTILISE 1 

Recruitment for our first trial, “UTILISE 1”, in which our participants travelled into UCL for 12 therapy sessions with a researcher, has finished. Fern, Claudia and Kerry have now finished collecting data; the next step will be analysing the results so we can understand how much the therapy helps and who might benefit from it the most. 

Our intern, Tae, has carefully checked videos of us conducting assessments, to make sure that all researchers have been doing the same thing and have not introduced any bias to the results. She has found that we have high levels of fidelity, which is important for the integrity of our research. Put simply, the test was conducted well.

UTILISE 2 

We have also been busy setting up for the next phase, “UTILISE 2”. We have been working hard with our software partners, Therapy Box, to turn the original therapy programme into an app. This means that people will be able to do the therapy by themselves, at home. With remote access to our tasks, participants can do the therapy from the comfort of their own sofas at times that work best for them.

Kerry and Fern have put together a PPI (Patient Public Involvement) group. People with aphasia and their family members are sharing their opinions and insights with us so that we can improve the research plan and better direct the research towards what people with aphasia want. We have had 3 meetings on Zoom, so far, and are grateful to those involved for their time and contributions.  

The future of UTILISE 

Rosemary, leader of the UTILISE team, has been putting together an application for future funding, which, if awarded, would help us to continue developing UTILISE in the coming years, and allow us to collect more data to increase the confidence in our findings.

In other news… 

UTILISE researcher, Claudia Bruns, welcomed the arrival of her second daughter, baby Millie, in October 2022. Mum, baby and family are doing well, and Claudia is enjoying her maternity leave. 

For more information on the work of the team: 

  • Watch this space for updates.

  • Get in touch with Fern or Kerry to learn about ways you could be involved. We have a waiting list for UTILISE 2, and are always keen to hear people’s points of view. We always take an evidence-based approach to developing our projects, but we don’t know what it’s like to live with aphasia first-hand.  

 

Upcoming Event- UTILISE Team at the UCL World Stroke Day Forum 2022

This Friday, the 28th of October, the UTLISE team will be at the UCL World Stroke Day Forum.

The event, sponsored by The National Brain Appeal, encourages an open dialogue between researchers, clinicians, charities, stroke survivors, carers and loved ones. It aims to empower stroke survivors and raise awareness about stroke research and rehabilitation at UCL.


The UTLISE team will be hosting an expo stall all day, giving interactive demonstrations of the new app-based therapy developed with Therapy Box. You will have the chance to see our automatic speech recognition technology in action.

At 11am, Professor Rosemary Varley, principal investigator of the UTILISE project, will deliver a 15-minute talk, “How do we provide effective aphasia rehabilitation?”, followed by a Q&A.

Rosemary will talk about developing the UTLISE app to allow individuals to self-administer intervention. Remote digital therapy approaches have the potential to increase therapy time whilst reducing costs. Rosemary will also address key questions such as what are the challenges of this approach from the perspectives of people with aphasia, family members and clinicians, and how might we address them?

Everyone is welcome so sign up to attend the in-person event here.

Can’t make it to London? Book a ticket to join online panel sessions to hear about UTLISE project and have the chance to ask any questions during the live Q&A.

 

UTILISE - Work Experience Recruit

The UTILISE team are excited to be working with Tae Horsfield, over the next year or so, as she gathers work experience on the project before studying towards an MSc. We’ll be getting Tae involved with a range of tasks, from transcription, to fidelity checks, to observation. In the short time she has been with us, she has already made a great impression, evidencing a diligent and thoughtful attitude. Here’s what Tae has to say:

I have recently graduated with a BSc in Psychology from Brunel University of London. In my dissertation, I investigated whether discrepancy scores between semantic and phonemic fluency tasks would predict the diagnostic status of patients groups suffering with various neurodegenerative diseases.

I have joined the UTILISE Project to expand my knowledge of acquired communication difficulties in older adults. Next September, I will be starting an MSc to further specialise in language sciences, neuroscience, and communication.

ASLTIP "Therapy Talks"

Professor Rosemary Varley at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)

The UTILISE team are very grateful to the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) group for having us at their Therapy Talks event last week!

Professor Rosemary Varley, principal investigator of the UTILISE project, delivered a talk titled: “What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””.

She gave a whistle-stop introduction to construction grammar, and spoke of how this theory informs our novel behavioural intervention targeting sentence rehabilitation in post-stroke aphasia.

Construction grammar suggests that we are able to store and access groups of words as single units, particularly if these phrases or sentences are “high frequency” (used often), for example: “I don’t know”.

This explains how someone with severe agrammatic expressive aphasia may be still be able to produce some grammatically correct utterances amidst otherwise syntactically disordered speech.

Using this idea of frequency, we are hoping to improve the accessibility and flexibility of these chunks in post-stroke aphasia.

“What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””

Dr Anna Volkmer at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)

Our UCL colleague, Dr Anna Volkmer, also delivered a terrific, and topical, presentation about Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), which is a language-led dementia, called: ““Will you still need me when I’m 65?” Dementia, language and speech and language therapy interventions”.

Anna raised the importance of taking a bespoke, person-centred approach to speech and language therapy.

For more of Anna’s work, see her recently published article: “Principles and philosophies for speech and language therapists working with people with primary progressive aphasia: an international expert consensus”.

Upcoming Talk - Rosemary Varley at ASLTIP

What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know”.

On Thursday the 31st of March, 2022, our UTILISE project PI, Professor Rosemary Varley, will be giving a talk at the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) “Therapy Talks” event.

Professor Varley will give an overview of the usage-based Construction Grammar that informs our novel intervention for sentence processing in post-stroke aphasia, and discuss why it is a useful framework for speech and language therapy.

Construction Grammar argues that constructions are the fundamental building blocks of language. Constructions can be fixed, ‘concrete’ words or phrases that are used often and stored in memory as whole chunks, or more abstract ‘skeletons’ which leave room for different lexical items to fit into ‘open slots’.

We are very much looking forward to this opportunity to share our work with clinicians in the field. For more information on the other expert speakers invited to present that day, and to book a ticket, check out the event page here.

We are recruiting! What does our study involve?

We’re in full swing here on the UTILISE project!

Claudia and Fern can be found in Chandler House every day now, running therapy sessions and processing lots of data. Even though we’re nice and busy, we are on the look-out for new recruits!

The study is for people who have aphasia, following a stroke, who have difficulties understanding and producing sentences. If this sounds like you, or someone you know, then we need you!

Check out our aphasia-friendly video here for more information about what the study involves.

Our novel computer therapy program is designed to be high-dose, running 3 times a week over 4 weeks (12 sessions). The therapy phase has 3 tasks:

  1. “Listen - Same or Different?”

  2. “Listen - Be Quick!” and,

  3. “Speak - Say Sentences”.

We are also looking for people to have MRI brain scans with us, so we can learn more about who may benefit from this therapy and whether the intervention can even change patterns of brain activity. Don’t worry, you do not have to have the brain scans to take part in the therapy.

If you are interested and would like to know more then check out our webpage for more information.

We would love to hear from you, so contact Fern or Claudia by email or telephone today.