A Mayo teenager has created an award winning app to respond to significantly long speech and language therapy waiting lists for children.
13 year old Dana Carney, a first year student in Mount St Michael Secondary school, Claremorris designed ‘Talk Time’ to provide vital assistance to parents of young children placed on waiting lists and unable to access vital SLT services at the most critical stages of their development.
Most recent studies show over 15,000 children have been waiting well over a year for speech and language assessment in Ireland.
Dana developed her app during after school sessions with Teen Turn, an organisation that provides teen girls with the opportunity to gain hands-on STEM experience.
The ‘Talk Time’ app has several features for both parents to use with their children and for speech and language therapists to send to individuals to work on between sessions.
Features include pronunciation exercises, animated illustrations on sounds production, exercises, games and videos for children to follow.