Last summer Mercy Gilpatric, an elderly North Side woman, had a stroke that wiped out her language abilities. Now, with the help of a "virtual therapist," she is regaining her language, one sentence at a time.
“It’s mind-boggling,” she said of the improvement she has made due to her training program. “The training has helped my reading so much.”
Gilpatric has a condition known as aphasia, which affects more than one million Americans, said Leora Cherney, director of the Center for Aphasia Research at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
Cherney developed a computer program known as ORLA, short for Oral Reading for Language in Aphasia, to help these patients recover.
ORLA features a virtual therapist known as "Ms. Pat," an avatar who guides patients through sentence reading exercises and asks patients to point to the words as they say them aloud....next...
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