Dizzying heights for Dyscover - Tae's tandem 🪂

We at UTILISE are excited (and nervous) to tell you all that our fantastic intern, Tae Horsfield, will be jumping from a plane, 10,000ft above the ground, in just over a month to raise money for aphasia charity Dyscover!

Tae is a wonderful person, who always puts others before herself. In her greatest feat of selflessness yet, she has taken on the challenge of a parachute jump, despite being terrified of heights, to bring support to a great cause. Tae has been volunteering for Dyscover, a charity that supports people living with aphasia, for several months. Daily sessions are run by speech and language therapists and volunteers, to provide for support for people living with aphasia as well as their family, friends and carers. They help people to develop their own communication strategies that work for them, and create a sense of community for people who often report feeling isolated as a result of their difficulties with speech, language and communication.

In Tae’s own words:

“One thing I can say is every member at Dyscover I have had the pleasure of meeting is determined to participate in all activities. I hope that I will be able to be as positive, courageous, and determined as the members at Dyscover when I jump out of the plane”.

The UTILISE team will be wishing Tae good weather and good luck on the 27th of July, with our feet planted firmly on the ground! To find out more, visit Tae’s fundraising page here.

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!

Fundraising for Aphasia - 2023 Brighton Half Marathon

In February 2023, our UTILISE researcher, Fern, ran the Brighton Half Marathon to raise money for aphasia charity Say Aphasia.

Say Aphasia is a fantastic charity run by people with aphasia, for people with aphasia. Founded by our steering committee member, Colin Lyall, following his stroke in 2013, the charity now has 15 drop-in groups (including a Zoom group) up and running across the UK, from Brighton to Abergavenny to Darlington. These groups offer a place for people with aphasia, whether caused by stroke or other brain injury, to meet people who can relate to their experiences and provide support in the form of community. The first-hand experience of those that run the charity means that there is a unique insight into what people living with aphasia want and need in the months and years that follow the onset of their speech and language difficulties.

So, on a bright and breezy February morning, Fern, her cousin Emily, her friend Lyle, founder of Say Aphasia, Colin Lyall, and several other fundraisers, set off on the 13.1-mile run. Fern and her team managed to raise over £1500 for the charity. The fundraising links are open indefinitely, so see this page if you are interested in making a donation in support of the cause.

 

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.

 

Upcoming Talk - Rosemary Varley at ASLTIP

What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know”.

On Thursday the 31st of March, 2022, our UTILISE project PI, Professor Rosemary Varley, will be giving a talk at the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) “Therapy Talks” event.

Professor Varley will give an overview of the usage-based Construction Grammar that informs our novel intervention for sentence processing in post-stroke aphasia, and discuss why it is a useful framework for speech and language therapy.

Construction Grammar argues that constructions are the fundamental building blocks of language. Constructions can be fixed, ‘concrete’ words or phrases that are used often and stored in memory as whole chunks, or more abstract ‘skeletons’ which leave room for different lexical items to fit into ‘open slots’.

We are very much looking forward to this opportunity to share our work with clinicians in the field. For more information on the other expert speakers invited to present that day, and to book a ticket, check out the event page here.

We are recruiting! What does our study involve?

We’re in full swing here on the UTILISE project!

Claudia and Fern can be found in Chandler House every day now, running therapy sessions and processing lots of data. Even though we’re nice and busy, we are on the look-out for new recruits!

The study is for people who have aphasia, following a stroke, who have difficulties understanding and producing sentences. If this sounds like you, or someone you know, then we need you!

Check out our aphasia-friendly video here for more information about what the study involves.

Our novel computer therapy program is designed to be high-dose, running 3 times a week over 4 weeks (12 sessions). The therapy phase has 3 tasks:

  1. “Listen - Same or Different?”

  2. “Listen - Be Quick!” and,

  3. “Speak - Say Sentences”.

We are also looking for people to have MRI brain scans with us, so we can learn more about who may benefit from this therapy and whether the intervention can even change patterns of brain activity. Don’t worry, you do not have to have the brain scans to take part in the therapy.

If you are interested and would like to know more then check out our webpage for more information.

We would love to hear from you, so contact Fern or Claudia by email or telephone today.