PARROT SOFTWARE: Expanding Abilities
Brain injuries place stumbling blocks in the lives of so many people in the United States. Every fifteen seconds, someone suffers a brain injury, and with most of these injuries comes a permanent disability. Cognitive limitations, such as loss of short-term or long-term memory accompany many brain injuries. Learning disabilities and aphasia, a condition which affects one’s speech, are sometimes resulting deficits.
With that in mind, a company called, Parrot Software, has designed a line of computer software to help help people with such disabilities improve upon memory, cognition, speech, and learning skills. Frederick F. Weiner says, “We now have six months experience with our Internet subscription plan,” and it is a proven success.
The program, which can be obtained through a subscription, offers more than sixty diverse “computer programs” that help you improve your skills in these areas. For an individual user, the subscription price is $24.95 per month. Businesses can buy a yearly subscription for $2,000. The programs come in the form of “multiple lessons” or a series of questions produced by the computer.
Each user gets “their own web page.” Because of it’s popularity, Parrot Software has made the program available to multiple users at treatment centers.
Programs for attention and perception can be accessed. For this particular exercise, the user can match visual objects on the screen. And the user also has the option of changing the way the objects look. Clinicians have the ability to record their voice, and visuals that "correspond" can be viewed simultaneously. The visuals can be altered to look more or less similar to suit the level of difficulty. It is recommended that you have a 486 DX-66MHz processor, or above.
According to Raymond W. Woodworth,clinicians have the ability to record their voice, and visuals that "correspond" can be viewed simultaneously.
The program also offers an exercise called "Spectral Speech." This exercise allows the user to record their voice, and then a diagram that looks similar to that of a heart rate is displayed on the screen. This graphs the inflection of one’s voice. The user must then try to “match” their voice inflection to be similar to what the graph displayed. This program comes with a number of features, including a measuring device which measures the sound level of one’s voice, instant playback, a “loop recorder,” and a standard example of how speech should sound. This program can be used to help those with speech difficulties, such as speech disorders that are a result of a neurological speech problem, phonological disorders, and many other speech difficulties. This can be purchased for $199.95.
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