UM Researchers Create Device to Help Stutterers

Drawing on one another’s expertise, a trio of University of Mississippi faculty members from different areas of campus has created a patent-pending device that could change the lives of people who stutter.

Paul Goggans, an electrical engineering professor, developed the prosthetic device, about the size of a cell phone, with Greg Snyder, associate professor of communications sciences and disorders, and Dwight Waddell, associate professor of health, exercise science and recreation management. The friends began working on the device after Snyder, himself a lifelong stutterer, demonstrated how he could speak much more fluently simply by feeling his throat while he and Waddell chatted over coffee.

“By feeling my throat vibrate when I speak, I get tactile speech feedback, which significantly reduces my stuttering,” Snyder said. “Dwight immediately understood my application of speech feedback and neural circuitry, and he then approached Paul, who agreed to make the device development a senior-level design project in his class.”

Since that time, the team has been focused on supporting and empowering the stuttering community by fighting social stigma and challenging the normal remedies associated with stuttering.
“Our device is portable, battery-powered and easy to use,” said Goggans, professor of electrical engineering and lead partner in the instrument’s design and fabrication. “These are important attributes because other behavioral treatments for stuttering are more intense; they require too much concentration and are exhausting.”

A prototype of the device was presented Tuesday (Oct. 16) as a “Hot Topic” at the 2012 Society of Neuroscience conference in New Orleans. The paper is among 150 selected from thousands of submissions.