Discover how the latest technologies can amplify your school-based practice, enhance deliverables, and help you achieve a healthy work-life balance as a speech-language pathologist in this day as of artificial intelligence (AI), Mixed Reality, Automation in the field of speech-Language Pathology and the workload.
Discover how the latest technologies can amplify your school-based practice, enhance deliverables, and help you achieve a healthy work-life balance as a speech-language pathologist.
Thank you, Dr. Michelle Boisvert Michelle, SLP, for graciously explaining the New-Day for SLPs. LinkedIn – Facebook – Instagram.
Blog at a Glance: Cutting-edge technologies are transforming speech-language pathology (SLP) practices, helping clinicians increase efficiency and effectiveness. For today’s busy school-based SLPs, balancing direct service time with essential, but often repetitive tasks, like documentation and material creation, is a constant challenge. Fortunately, tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Extended Reality (XR), and automation are shifting this balance, helping SLPs spend less time on time-consuming tasks and more time with their students. Let’s explore the fun, functional, and ethical applications of these innovations and discover platforms that integrate seamlessly into your school-day workflow.
Here’s a quick look at how each can benefit your school-based practice:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): Personalizes therapy materials, generates custom treatment plans, and offers tailored recommendations, all while saving time.
- Extended Reality (XR): Makes therapy more engaging with immersive experiences, interactive visuals, and real-time reading and translation assistance.
- Automation: Streamlines repetitive workload tasks, including diagnostic report writing, data collection, and scheduling, allowing more time for direct student services.
Let’s check out each type of technology to see how it can support your daily services and workload.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Purpose: To Assist Speech Language Pathologists
Benefits: AI has incredible potential for revolutionizing SLP practices by assisting with essential, yet “low-stakes”, clinical resources and tasks. It can help generate personalized treatment plans, brainstorm intervention ideas, create engaging passages at appropriate readability levels, and even produce unique visuals. AI powered tools can save SLPs time on the development of therapy material, allowing them to focus on expert-required aspects of their practice.
Real Clinical Applications:
• Personalized Treatment Plans: Through AI prompts, SLPs can input student interests, target goals, and learning styles to generate customized plans that meet individual needs. This highly personalized approach keeps materials relevant and engaging for students, making sessions more effective.
• High Interest Right Level Stories: Personalize stories that are at the appropriate reading level your students’ needs but are all about the topics they love. This use of AI saves time and boosts engagement. Better yet, use DALL-E to generate a one-of-a-kind personalized visual that goes with that story!
• Targeted Recommendations: Enter in the skills that you want recommendations for, add the setting and age level and AI will suggest strategies and resources specific to your needs. As SLPs, we always have the final say, but AI can provide us with a good list of choices. Ask the AI to provide accurate citations with links so you can verify the evidence before approving and sharing with teams. Tip: Bing’s Copilot is particularly good for this.
Top 3 AI Platforms to Try:
1. MagicSchool: Assists educators and SLPs in creating personalized educational content.
2. ChatGPT by OpenAI: Generates diverse therapy materials and visuals quickly, making it a great tool for SLPs creating lesson plans.
3. Socratic by Google: This mobile app uses image recognition to answer questions, and providing link to online educational resources, making it ideal for SLPs and students who need on-the-go support.Considerations: While AI offers significant advantages, it’s essential that SLPs are ethical and transparent about AI generated material. AI generated text is prone to errors and often provides false information (for some eye-opening information on AI alternative facts, check out this article), so it is essential that SLPs review any AI-generated content to ensure it meets evidence-based clinical standards and addresses student-specific needs.
- Extended Reality (XR) in SLP
Purpose: To Enhance Therapy
Benefits: XR, encompassing Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), can transform therapy sessions by making them more immersive and engaging, with some XR tools providing in-the-moment input when and where enhancement is needed. This technology is particularly useful for role-playing, reading assistance, instant translations, and interactive visuals, providing a dynamic and stimulating environment that meets the specific and personalized needs of students, in and out of therapy settings.
Real Clinical Applications:
• Role-Play Integration: VR creates realistic virtual environments that can be customized based on client need for various role-play forms of intervention.
• Reading and Translation Assistance: AR tools provide visual and auditory assists to make print accessible. Simply open the app, point your camera at the print (this even works with handwriting), and the print will be selected and audio options available with a click of a button. Most print to speech AR tools also provides instant translations – perfect for English Language Learners.
• Interactive Visuals: Enhance engagement with dynamic, 3D interactive visuals during sessions.
Top 3 XR Platforms to Explore:
1. withVR.app: Offers VR applications designed for therapeutic use, namely fluency disorders, and can be used in a telepractice setting as well.
2. Google Lens – This free app has a feature that allows you to take a picture of any text (like a worksheet, sign, or handwritten note) and it will automatically detect the text and provide options to listen to or translate the text – pairs nicely with wireless earbuds for seamless accessibility!
3. ARLoopa – Offers XR in various formats and has a nice library of 3D images that can be superimposed on your environment (through your phone or tablet) and are appropriate for school-based instruction.
Considerations: XR technologies are fun and provide highly practical intervention approaches, but they do require investment in hardware, software and training. Evaluate the practicality, cost, and the learning curve associated with these technologies.
- Automation Purpose: To Streamline High-Value Workload Tasks
Benefits: Automation tools eliminate manual work, streamline repetitive processes, and reduce human errors. This is crucial when speech language pathologists need to deliver valuable and high-stakes clinical documents or information such as diagnostic reports and progress updates. These are important when presenting testing findings at meetings as SLPs need to justify evidence-based clinical decisions. By inputting minimal data (like standardized scores or tally counts), automation platforms instantly retrieve pre-written, clinician-approved text linked to that information. This ensures accuracy in important documents. As a result of using automation platforms, SLPs can spend less time on tedious tasks and more time on putting their clinical expertise to amazing use!
Practical Applications:
• Diagnostic Report Creation: Automated report writing tools create high-value, error-free documents, significantly reducing the time SLPs spend on manual writing andeliminating unintentional errors.
• Data Calculation and Progress Updates: Automate the calculations of therapy data and use that information to automatically generate progress updates.
• Workflow Task Automation: Use automation features in commonly used calendars and text and email platforms to handle routine administrative tasks such as scheduling reminders, and follow-ups messages.
Top 3 Automation Tools to Implement:
1. easyReportPRO: This platform automates every aspect of report writing, boosting organization, eliminating errors, and reducing turnaround time.
2. SLPNow: Automates data collection through online activities and generates progress reports based on inputted information.
3. SwivelScheduler: Ideal for automating scheduling (even for groups), goal rotation, data collection, and therapy planning.
Considerations: While automation is a game-changer for personal and clinic wide efficiency, it is crucial to periodically review that the verbiage linked to the entered data aligns with current clinician needs and best practices. Additionally, if personal and protected information is collected, it is essential to ensure any platform complies with confidentiality and legal requirements.
Balancing Technology and Professional Expertise
While these technologies provide significant support, it’s vital to balance their use with professional expertise and human interaction. Effective integration of technology should enhance, not replace, the personal touch and clinical expertise that is crucial in therapy, diagnosis and consultation. This is a point that was made in a 2021 blog by Presence on exciting new technologies to try out in therapy. By staying informed and open to the possibilities of these new technologies, SLPs can leverage these innovations to enhance their workload efficiency and client outcomes. In addition, knowing how to best use AI, XR and Automation in clinical practice allows SLPs to focus on aspects of their job that require expert attention, care and professional judgment. Interested in more information about how SLPs use innovative technology? Check out this blog about the Synergy between AI, Automation and SLPs!
About Dr. Michelle Boisvert
Michelle is the co-founder of easy ReportPRO, a powerful software that helps speech-language pathologists (SLPs) create high-quality diagnostic reports quickly and easily. Michelle’s expertise in telepractice and technology-enabled strategies, combined with her personal experience of burnout and considering leaving the SLP profession, gives her a unique understanding of the challenges SLPs face, especially when it comes to the high workload of writing diagnostic reports. With this blog, Michelle aims to share her knowledge and experience to help SLPs use technology to optimize their report writing process, save time, and achieve a better work-life balance. LinkedIn – Facebook – Instagram
