An educational platform based on expert systems, speech recognition, and ludic activities to support the lexical and semantic development in children from 2 to 3 years

The language and communication are considered mainstays of cognitive, psychological and emotional development of children. Commonly, during the first four years of life, children make significant progress in learning the language. However, in some cases, there arise delays or differences in patterns of language acquisition, aspects that constitute warnings of developmental problems. For these reasons, in this paper, we describe an educational platform (Pike-Aprende) aimed at supporting the following aspects: a) planning, monitoring, and intervention activities in children (carried out by teachers and Speech and Language Therapists, SLTs), b) automatic design of therapy/stimulation plans for children, and c) supporting the analysis/discrimination of utterances produced by children during sessions. To this aim, we developed a set of tools for web and mobile devices, an expert system for recommending exercises and activities (based on the patient's profile). With the aim of determining the real feasibility of our proposal, we validated the platform with the support of experts in the initial education program. The experts used the system while developed therapy and stimulation sessions with children. The results show significant progress in several participants (in comparison to traditional therapy).