The gamified Näkörata app makes lipreading practice accessible to everyone

Lipreading supports speech perception and is especially important in noisy environments or when there are problems with hearing. Vision complements the information received through hearing: phonemes that are difficult to hear can often be identified more easily visually.

Lipreading is an essential part of speech reception, even though people often use it unconsciously. Research shows that lipreading supports young children’s speech development and is also connected to the development of reading skills.

“Näkörata responds to the growing need for high-quality, easily accessible lipreading training materials. The gamified exercises motivate users to improve their results and practice in a sustained way. The app is suitable both for speech therapy use and for self-instructed use,” says Kerttu Huttunen, Professor of Logopedics at the University of Oulu.

Näkörata is suitable for primary-school-aged children and older users, but younger children can also use it with parental support. Adults may find it useful, for example, in the early stages of using hearing aids or cochlear implants, when combining auditory and visual speech information is particularly important.

The app includes a wide range of gamified exercises, ranging from single words to stories. These include sentence-building tasks, memory games, bingo activities, and video exercises performed using slow motion.

The app was developed in a Gaze on lips? research project led by the University of Oulu’s Research Unit of Logopedics, in collaboration with the Universities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Eastern Finland. In the project, it is investigated how hearing primary-school-aged children and their age-peers with hearing loss use their gaze when lipreading words and sentences. It also examines underpinnings of lipreading skills and the ability to discriminate facial expressions.

In the study, children with hearing loss practiced lipreading with the Näkörata app for two months, and their skills were measured before and after the training period.

The structure and operating principles of Näkörata are similar to those of the previously published and widely used Kuulorata app. Kuulorata (Auditory Tract) is designed especially for adults’ auditory training and is used, for example, to support the use of newly implemented hearing aids and cochlear implants.

The Näkörata app can be downloaded free of charge from app stores for many Android and Apple devices. The technical implementation was carried out by Outloud, a Tampere-based company specializing in rehabilitation applications.

Lipreading use in communication and the Näkörata app will be presented at the Uutta logopediassa seminar at the University of Oulu on April 14 from 14:30 to 16:00. The event can also be followed remotely. The remote participation link is available on the opin.fi service, where it can be found using the search terms ´uutta logopediassa´.