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!

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”.