About the applications
FONO is a collection of applications for the speech therapy designed for the use of speech therapists, schools with children with the communication disorder and other special learning needs, as well as for the use of such individuals in their home therapy.
Each application is independent of other applications of Fono, they can be combined to suit the individual needs of each patient. Fono does not limit the use of the computer for other purposes.
Sounds of Everyday Life
The application introduces patient to the sounds of the common daily life, such as ringing of the telephone, wailing siren, sound of breaking glass and many more. For the ease of orientation the objects are organized in topics, such as transport, animals, people, musical instruments, household. The sounds are linked with pictures capturing the object associated with the given sound. The task of a patient is to connect correctly the pictures with the sounds, and that makes learning interesting, captivating and highly efficient. The application allows for both exercise and testing regimes, when it also computes the success rate. The application works with some 70 sounds organized in six topics.
Vocabulary
Comprizes about 500 idioms of common vocabulary. They are expressed in the written form, voice recording and also a video sequence with recorded movement of articulation organs while saying the word. The idioms are categorized in 13 topics, such as toys, food, fruits, vegetables, human body, etc. This application also allows the use in exercise and testing regime. For the better use of idioms by patients with varying needs the idioms are also categorized as easy, intermediate and all. That way the speech therapist is not delayed with organizing the pictures during the session.
Phonematic Recognition
In an easy, playful manner assists with the development of the phonematic differentiation of the phonemes, as in words that differ in one sound like in “mat – bat”, “pen – ten”, etc. All pairs used in Fono are selected according to specifics of Slovak language, and they include all pairs listed in Nádvorníková – Dvončová. The settings of this application allow for the specification whether a phoneme is to be placed in the beginning, middle or at the end of the word, and also to list the phonemes that are to be used by the application in either exercise or testing. The application displays the number of words that fulfill given conditions. The use of this application during the diagnosis of phonematic hearing enhaces its objectivity as neither pictures nor sound recordings loose their original quality. The application uses about 110 phonematic pairs with a variety of phonems.
Warm-up
Assists with the development of motoric skills of articulation organs. The set of exercises emanating from the Lapoint – Wertz test stretches and conditions the oro motor muscles for the upcoming workload. The speech therapist may that way focus on correcting the errors of the patient. Video recordings can be repeated, played in step-wise manner, back and forth if need be, and the individual exercises may be left so as to create individual exercise sets. The results are usually improved by using a mirror next to the computer screen while warming up, as the patient can see and correct himself. It leaves out the need for frequent reminders and that, in turn improves the session atmosphere. All recordings are perfect w.r.t. professional pronunciation and they do not loose their quality by repetition.