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From Clinical Need to Innovation: Bringing Project AISAY to Life 🩺➡️💡
There were quite a few points during Project AISAY when things became difficult, and it would have been easy to stop.
What kept me going was actually quite simple. If this could give our stroke patients more opportunities to practise their speech and communicate better, then I felt it was worth trying.
As a rehabilitation physician, I see many stroke patients with communication difficulties. It can have a huge impact on their confidence, independence, and ability to return to their usual lives.
Speech therapy is an important part of their rehabilitation, but there is only so much therapy time available during an inpatient stay.
That made me think about whether we could use technology to give patients more opportunities to practise, while still having our speech therapists guide their rehabilitation.
I did not come into this as an AI or technology expert. I came into it because I saw a clinical need.
That was how Project AISAY started.
AISAY is an AI-supported speech therapy app that allows stroke patients to practise their speech outside their usual therapy sessions.
One thing AISAY has taught me is that having an idea is the easy part. Making it work in the real clinical environment is much harder. We had to keep refining the project based on feedback from our speech therapists, patients and the different teams involved.
There were things we had to change along the way, and things that took much longer than we initially expected. It also meant learning about areas that were completely outside my usual clinical work. But each time we solved one problem, the project moved a little further forward. Eventually, something that started as an idea began to become something we could actually use with our patients.
The concept sounded quite simple, but getting there was not without difficulties. There were technical issues, clinical considerations, governance requirements and practical challenges to work through. At different stages, there were questions about whether we could actually make it work. My team and I just kept working through them one at a time.
The aim of AISAY is not to replace speech therapists. It is to help them extend the amount of therapy they can provide. While patients are in hospital, they can use the app to practise independently between their usual speech therapy sessions. This gives them an opportunity for more therapy time without needing the therapist to be physically present for every session.
It also gives us a way to continue supporting patients after discharge. Instead of therapy ending when they leave the hospital, patients can continue practising at home. This means our speech therapists can potentially reach and support more patients, while patients have more opportunities to practise both in hospital and at home.
For me, that is what AISAY is really about: helping our therapists do more with the capacity we have, while giving our patients more opportunities to work on their recovery, empowering them.
AISAY has taught me to be comfortable with not having all the answers at the beginning. There will always be reasons why something is difficult to do, especially when you are trying something new. What matters is whether the problem you are trying to solve is important enough to keep working at it.
You do not have to understand every aspect of technology to start. AISAY started with a very simple problem: our patients needed more opportunities to practise. Everything else grew from there. As clinicians, we see the problems our patients face every day. Sometimes innovation simply starts with believing that something can be better, and being willing to do something about it.
Start with the problem. Find the right people. Keep going when it gets difficult. You may be surprised by how far a simple idea can go.
Written by Dr Elvina Tay, Consultant, Post-Acute and Continuing Care, JCH