What is Aphasia ?
The annual number of stroke events in the EU will increase from 613,148 in 2015 to 819,771 in 2035 an average increase of 34% (Stroke Alliance for Europe). One third of stroke survivors is left with aphasia, the incidence is estimated around 200,000 in Europe and 300,000 in the US.
Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production and/or comprehension of oral and written communication. Aphasia can be so severe as to make communication with the patient almost impossible, or it can be very mild. It may affect mainly a single aspect of language use, such as the ability to retrieve the names of objects, or the ability to put words together into sentences, or the ability to read or write.
Diagnostic & Rehabilitation today
Today speech-language pathologists perform aphasia diagnostics with a paper-based test that provides input to define a personalized therapy based on the individual needs.
This test is quite time consuming and the diagnostic is sometimes difficult or not possible for severe aphasia patients. Paper-based tests can also demonstrate ceiling effects in patients with slight aphasia. The most important shortcoming of paper-based tests is the inability to include neuroplasticity changes of language during aphasia recovery in the diagnostic and therapeutic setting.
Neurolap : a novel diagnostic & therapy guidance solution
This innovation provides speech pathologists with more frequent, better and faster diagnosis. This diagnostic algorithm generates important cost savings enabling speech pathologists to diagnose aphasia more frequently, better and faster especially for patients for whom the current tests are limited. Diagnostic evaluations can also be repeated more frequently which will lead to better monitoring and compliance to treatments. First evidence for EEG based diagnosis has been demonstrated in 25 patients.
