Coding for Speech Therapy
By Ethan Drower
I’m Ethan, the Founder and CEO of Speechbytes.
Since I was young, I always worked on software projects. Back then they were mostly for amusement and to try and learn more. As I improved as a “Computer Scientist” and as an entrepreneur, my ideas grew more complex. My University curriculum from DePaul was challenging and very worthwhile for building hard skills in software development, but I was also eager to get out there and tackle some real world challenges.
The Speech Therapy field is a really interesting one. Notorious for being ‘technically challenged’ many experts in this field will be the first to say that their adoption of the latest technology as an industry is not always the fastest. I often helped my mother (who is a practicing Speech Pathologist) with various software/website related things for her business. One day as I spoke with her about some challenges she faces, that there was a opportunity to use software to improve her treatment practices.
Thus, Speechbytes was born, a software platform that combines an interactive tablet game for children with a highly effective administrative platform for their Speech Therapist. The idea here is to provide a struggling child with a game they want to play that simultaneously helps them practice various speech sounds. We record those sounds (during gameplay) and make them available to their Therapist to listen to online later. This gives the Speech Therapist a never before had ability to review their client’s home practice sessions.
From a software perspective, I work on both parts of the business. The more creative side, is the game side. There we build our games with the Unity2D game engine and have had a lot of fun working with users to improve gameplay. The second half of our platform is the web based panel for Speech Pathologists. That uses primarily frontend Javascript and communicates with our cloud based storage of all the client sound recordings.
One of the more rewarding parts of this industry is seeing something you’ve created digitally affect and improve lives in the physical world.
Without computer science, I likely never would have been able to conceive of this challenge in the speech world let alone be able to build a solution that is effective. One of the more rewarding parts of this industry is seeing something you’ve created digitally affect and improve lives in the physical world. Speechbytes has been my most rewarding venture in Computer Science to date, and I look forward to continuing to grow the company and improve our platform.
What tools and languages do I use?
- Unity2D
- Javascript
- Python
- Linux Servers
- Heroku
- Mongodb
Ethan is a software entrepreneur, who’s ventures/interests range from Financial and Regulatory to Speech and Language Pathology.
