STARDUST

Speech Recognition for People with Severe Dysarthria

Research Team


The team has been bought together from three departments across two institutions. The Department of Medical Physics Barnsley District General Hospital, the Institute of General Practice and Primary Care, the Department of Computer Science both in the University of Sheffield. The Computer scientist post will be based in the Department of Computer Science, working directly with Professor Phil Green and closely with the speech therapist (yet to be appointed).

Professor Phil Green is head of the 20-strong Speech and Hearing research group in the department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield . This group has world-class expertise in computer models of hearing, speech perception and speech technology, particularly robust automatic speech recognition and large vocabulary speech recognition. Prof. Green currently co-ordinates two major EC-funded projects in robust speech recognition, SPHEAR and RESPITE. He has approximately 60 publications in these and related fields. He supervised the work on OLT (which is a precursor to this project, see below) in collaboration with Dr. Sarah Howard of Human Communication Sciences.

Dr Mark Hawley is Principal Clinical Engineer and Director of Research and Development at Barnsley District General Hospital. He has worked in the field of electronic assistive technology (EAT) for over 10 years. He has many publications in peer-reviewed journals and has presented at numerous national and international meetings. He has guest-edited the Journal of Medical Engineering and Physics for an issue on electronic assistive technology. He was recently invited to give a keynote lecture at an international congress on speech recognition (Talking to Computers II) on the use of speech recognition for people with disabilities.
He manages a service which provides EAT to people with disabilities. He is Chair of the Trent Rehabilitation Advisory Group, which advises NHS Executive Trent on rehabilitation-related matters. His team has been involved in the evaluation of commercial speech recognition products for use by disabled people in the South Yorkshire area. He has broad experience of using speech recognition with disabled people.
Dr Lynda Webb is a research fellow in a joint appointment between the University of Sheffield and Barnsley District General Hospital. She has been working in the field of disability and technology for over fourteen years, both in assistive technology development and evaluation research. She has worked on both national and European projects in these fields. She has published in peer reviewed journals and presented papers in national and international conferences.

Professor Pamela Enderby is one of the leading UK experts in dysarthria. She is Chair of Community Rehabilitation within the Institute for General Practice and Primary Care within ScHARR at the University of Sheffield. Professor Enderby was Chair and Vice President of the College of Speech and Language Therapists in 1993/4 and President of the Society for Research and Rehabilitation from 1994 to 1996. She was appointed Chair of Community Rehabilitation, Sheffield University in 1996 and combines this post with one of Head of the Department of Human Communication Sciences. She has led research programmes into various aspects of therapy, particularly related to models of delivery, effectiveness and outcomes, and has published widely. She has expertise in computer-based speech therapy and in the evaluation of technology both for therapy and rehabilitation.

Dr. Athanassios Hatzis
Mark Parker
Simon Brownsell