Best Practices for Transitioning to Speech Teletherapy

Let’s Get Personal: Customizing AAC

In our course on personalizing AAC devices, Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) will learn practical tools that can be used to identify, create, and implement custom icons and pages on Lingraphica AAC devices. During this course, SLPs will:

- identify principles of the Life Participation Approach to Aphasia (LPAA)
- explore clinical examples to help formulate intervention plans and implementation strategies
- learn how to educate communication partners on how to help customize a Lingraphica AAC device to meet life participation goals

Lingraphica’s course “Let’s Get Personal: Customizing AAC” incorporates the five core values of LPAA into device customization. In this course, we will review the core values of LPAA, including enhanced life participation, personal and environmental factors, and availability of services. Using these core values, we will provide clinicians with practical tools that they can use to customize a Lingraphica high-tech AAC device to their patients’ wants and interests.

This course provides an overview of Lingraphica’s three high-tech AAC devices: MiniTalk, TouchTalk, and AllTalk. All of Lingraphica’s devices are compatible with LPAA, and we will demonstrate the specifics of icon creation and page customization using our technology.

LPAA invites clinicians to place the clients’ goals at the center of all decision-making and goal development. This allows SLPs to begin with a broader focus on the clients’ life, and hone in on the activities that they most want to do. We will review the ways in which AAC customization provides scaffolding steps to allow clients to communicate within that goal.

The explicit goal of LPAA is enhancement of life participation. By creating custom icons and pages around a patient’s specific life and interests, clinicians can encourage patients to take an active role in their own life and ultimately communicate about things that are meaningful to them.