How did it start?
In 2011 Sam was working at Frenchay hospital in Bristol with a man with Parkinson's disease who spoke too quickly to be easily understood. She wanted to try delayed auditory feedback with him — a technique developed for people who stammer, but also shown to help some people with Parkinson's. The equipment was bulky, fiddly and expensive, and she had to borrow it from another NHS trust. Even then it was not something she could leave with a patient to practise at home.
Garry, at the time a software engineer at Hewlett Packard, heard the frustration and thought the technique belonged on the device her patients were already carrying. Twenty-four hours later there was a prototype running on an Android phone. It became DAF Pro, and Sam could try delayed auditory feedback with a patient immediately, wherever she was working.
Four more apps have followed, each the same way: a barrier Sam ran into in clinic, checked against the research, designed together, then tested by patients, colleagues, friends and family before it goes anywhere near an app store. They are used in speech therapy clinics and in people's homes around the world.
The full account is in the Speechtools story.
