BAS Conference - Kerry is our Rising Research Star! 🌟

The UTILISE team have been busy spreading the word about our work at international conferences over the last couple of months.

In September, Kerry presented (twice!) at the British Aphasiology Society (BAS) Conference, which was held in London at UCL Queen Square. She spoke about outcomes of our pilot trial, both qualitative and quantitative, which we ran earlier in the year. We would like to thank all the participants of the pilot trial for their work using the app and for their attendance at focus groups. These participants gave us valuable insight into their experiences and shared their suggestions for improving the app. Kerry presented these insights as part of her presentations, highlighting the importance of developing effective remote therapy options to maximise dose potential for patients.

Kerry Dathan at the British Aphasiology Society Conference with her Rising Research Star award.

We would also like to thank the BAS team for giving us the opportunity to present our work. It was a terrific 3-day event with lots of fascinating talks, including some from service users. UTILISE team member Fern also presented a poster, sharing some outcomes from our in-person therapy trial.

We are very proud that Kerry was awarded the “Rising Research Star” award for her contributions to the conference. She is, without doubt, already a star, and has a bright research career ahead of her.

Well done, Kerry! A true asset to the team.

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.  

 

Atypical Interaction Conference 2019 in Helsinki - a short report

A bit belated, but here is Claudia’s report on the Atypical Interaction Conference 2019. It was included in the British Aphasiology Society Summer newsletter 2019.

The Atypical Interaction Conference 2019 (AIC 2019) is an event for researchers interested in studying atypical interactions, for instance by using Conversation Analysis. The AIC 2019 took place in Helsinki, Finland from 17 to 19 June 2019. This year’s title of the conference was “Resources and Challenges in Participation”. Participants came from all over the world and presented on a variety of topics, including autism, Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), classroom interaction, and aphasia and dementia research. Keynote speakers were Douglas W. Maynard (University of Madison-Wisconsin), talking about concrete competence to inform diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders, Charlotta Plejert (Linköping University), presenting on dementia assessment and care in relation to minority ethnic groups, and Mike Clarke (University College London), showing fascinating examples of interactions involving children with disabilities using AAC, and discussing asymmetry, timing and competence. The abstract booklet can be found here.

Thanks to the BAS Conference Support Fund, I was able to attend this conference, where I presented a poster (“I don’t know” as a resource for turn construction in aphasia) on day 2.

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For people with a language or cognitive impairment, the difference between "know" and "think" can be the difference between understanding and not understanding a sentence.

Congratulations, Claudia!

Congratulations to Claudia Bruns for passing her PhD viva last Tuesday! Claudia’s dissertation is titled “A usage-based approach to language processing and intervention in aphasia”, her project was supervised by Dr Suzanne Beeke, Prof Rosemary Varley and Dr Vitor Zimmerer. She was examined by Dr Paul Conroy (University of Manchester) and Dr Carolyn Bruce (UCL) and passed with no corrections! This reflects the experience we had with Claudia, who has been an excellent student and colleague.

Below are pictures from our celebration in our weird little kitchen.

Blurry and from left to right: Dr Carolyn Bruce, Dr Paul Conroy, Dr Claudia Bruns

Blurry and from left to right: Dr Carolyn Bruce, Dr Paul Conroy, Dr Claudia Bruns

Rosemary, Vitor, Claudia and Suzanne

Rosemary, Vitor, Claudia and Suzanne

- Vitor

Congratulations to Tom Shortland!

Last year Tom Shortland submitted his dissertation as part of his MSc in Speech and Language Sciences course. The title was An investigation of the influence of prosodic cueing on the ablity of individuals with aphasia to make grammaticality judgments, and the project was supervised by Rosemary Varley and Vitor Zimmerer. The project is a spinoff of Sabrina Mahmood's PhD work as we started to ask more questions about modality effects in the sentence processing of aphasic and neurotypical individuals.

Tom was an excellent student who conducted his work thoughtfully and thoroughly. He received a great mark and recently was awarded a Robin Tavistock student prize for excellent work in the field of aphasia.

award2.jpg

We are planning to turn his dissertation into a manuscript for peer-review. Tom has started his job as a speech and language therapist at a hospital in Norfolk.

- Vitor