I was recently given the opportunity to try out the Sanapsis app. The app has picture naming cards, verb photo cards, cards to prompt questions and descriptions, sentence-building/unscrambling tasks, etc. I want to tell you some of the exercises I think will be helpful to use with my aphasic patients.
 |
| Sanapsis App |
My favorites:
Giving Instructions-- This is a unique task I haven't found in many other language apps. It gives prompts such as, "Give instructions on how to give a dog a bath." I get tired of picture and object description tasks for sentence and conversation elicitation. This is new, and having it on a tablet device or smart phone seems to spice things up a bit in therapy as well.
Retell a Story-- I thought this was great, because every story contains humor in the punchline, and would allow for me to assess humor, abstract language skills, inferencing abilities in patients with higher-level cognitive deficits. I will definitely be using this with some of my R CVA patients who need practice understanding subtleties. Not to mention, it's a great memory exercise!
Organize a sentence-- This one (pictured above) requires the patient to put the sentence back in the correct order. Some would be pretty tough for my aphasic patients, but could work really well for some of the cognitively-impaired patients who need to work on sequencing, or cognitive organization.
It was obvious that some of the naming and description pictures and word choices were more European/UK, but it could make for interesting responses from the patients and provide an opportunity for them to take initiative (e.g., "I don't really know what that is! Is it some sort of tool?")
The app is about to come out with a new update including edits and many more pictures (they tell me it will have over 200 more words, and over 5000 more pictures). They were also really great about wanting my feedback and suggestions. Check it out at the app store! (Not yet available at the Google Play Store.)
Kristin
No comments:
Post a Comment