1677L - Using Telepractice for the Assessment of Dysarthria and Dysphonia

This session is developed by, and presenters invited by, Motor Speech Disorders and Other Speech Sound Disorders in Adults. Telepractice has expanded over the years as a popular service delivery method, given the benefits related to time, cost, and reduced patient and caregiver burden. The COVID-19 pandemic required speech-language pathologists to quickly adapt in-person evaluation protocols to be compatible with telepractice, despite limited research or guidelines on how to do so effectively and reliability. Dysarthria and dysphonia evaluations typically include acoustic measurements and auditory-perceptual judgments that are heavily affected by technologic specifications. These factors limit the validity, reliability, and clinicians' overall certainty of perceptual speech ratings via telepractice. In this tutorial we aim to provide speech-language pathologists with a research-based protocol for obtaining evaluations of dysarthria and dysphonia via telepractice, and reporting the validity of those evaluations.