All The Things We Love About Speech Therapy With Adults

This blog is about all the things we at Sanapsis Love about Speech Therapy with Adults.

Sanapsis Svenska is getting some love with a new update

November 22, 2019Nana Lehtinen

Sanapsis Svenska just got an update (1.4) and is now better than ever! We launched two new exercises, one in our Production category (Jag vill…) and one in Reading category (Ordna Berättelsen). Can you spot the newbies below?

Production category now has six exercises in total. The new I want to.. (Jag vill..) -exercise brings a new challenge to the mix. With this exercise you can challenge your patient to make choices and express opinions about different activities. Also useful for someone who has a tendency to persevere in their output - using a sentence frame with varied endings can be used to boost flexibility too!

Reading category now has seven exercises on multiple levels of reading. The new Organize instructions (Ordna berättelsen) brings along meaningful reading and logic deduction based on what you read. On screen you will see 4-7 sentences (based on the settings you choose). These sentences contain step by step instructions to completing a task (e.g. hanging a painting, changing sheets, buying flowers from the florist, change light bulb, making a snowman). Organizing these instructions to form a coherent answer to the question: How do you …. (hang a painting, change sheets, buy flowers, change a light bulb, make a snowman…) provides deductive sentence level reading, a working memory challenge and the reward of reading the instructions to your therapist to make sure they make sense. Fun, huh?

Let us know what you think!

We are always happy to hear from you at sanapsis@puheklinikka.net or via this website.

Update 3.1: Sanapsis and Sanapsis Suomi

September 04, 2019Nana Lehtinen

Hello all you lovely people!

We have been improving Sanapsis and Sanapsis Suomi side by side this summer and release 3.1 for both apps is here. For this one our focus has been on Production category, but as minds tend to wander you might find some additions scattered across other categories as well. I will give a quick overview of the heftier additions here and hope you enjoy exploring more in the app on your own.

First up, our Naming exercises. We get a lot of very nice feedback of our photos, so we decided to add some more. Altogether 227 images have been added to Naming (nouns) and Naming (actions) and I want to. As always the images that pop up on your screen here are randomized to keep things interesting. This means that the new images will be mixed in with the familiar ones and you will see them popping up as you go. Hope you like them!

When using Organize a sentence you will come across new items as well. We added 100 new sentences! Evenly distributed across levels so remember to hit that info button and adjust levels.

Precise sentences gained 91 new tasks and its counterpart Descriptive sentences gained 70. Enjoy both!

As always, we appreciate feedback, suggestions for improvement and of course just hearing about you and how you are doing with Sanapsis. Let us know at sanapsis (a) puheklinikka.net!

More to like in Sanapsis Svenska!

August 21, 2019Nana Lehtinen

We just launched our first official update to our Sanapsis Svenska (1.3), yay! To celebrate, this post will mostly be about the newly localized exercises for Swedish. So, if you are using the English or Finnish version of Sanapsis, mostly old news. But not to despair - we think one can always use a refresher. Maybe you have not been taking these exercises for a spin with your patients lately and could use some motivation to make more use of the stuff you already own. Let’s find out!

The update comes with three new exercises to our Swedish version of Sanapsis: Discussion starters, Build a question and Sentence and picture. Old favorites with many possibilities!

Let’s first have a look at Sentence and Picture / Lause ja kuva / Mening och bild. You see this one in our Reading- section, right up there in the right hand corner of the menu.

Sentence and Picture / Lause ja kuva / Mening och bild - exercise comes with two levels. Level one shows an image and two, three or four sentences, depending on the settings. Ask your patient to choose the one that matches the image. On level 1 the sentences are rather simple and very different from each other. On level 2 the setup is the same but sentences are more abstract or semantically closer. As the patient chooses a sentence the text changes color but no feedback is given by the app. It’s up to you to decide how to make the most of the material in your session.

Some of our exercises are provided to you in multiple categories. Mostly for easy access but also because we do not want you to get stuck with just one way to use the materials you have at your disposal. Creativity and flexibility, that’s what it takes to become a fluent Sanapsis user! One of these exercises is Build a question / Valitse kysymyssana / Välj frågeordet and you can find it in categories Production and Reading.

Build a question looks very similar to the Sentence and Picture we just introduced. So, if you know your way around that, this one is an easy step. Here you see an image, a sentence that lacks a question word and two, three or four question words. You know it by now, right? Yes! You ask your patient to choose a question word that completes the sentence. Under the info button you see in the lower right hand corner you can always find all the settings and more info on how and when to use this exercise. Nice.

For the next one we are going to looking at categories Semantics and Reading.

In both of these categories you will find a new exercise: Discussion starters / Keskustelunkäynnistäjät / Diskussioninledningar. This is a simple but powerful exercise. It comes with two levels (settings under the info button, as usual). Level 1 has straightforward questions you can mostly answer with one or two words. I love using this when introducing using AAC-methods, great for writing down some options for the patient to point at or even make use of pictures and drawings! Level 2 comes with more complex questions that invite the patient to tell more. If you hand the iPad over to your patient and let them choose the topic to discuss with you, you create a perfect place to work on making initiatives and asking for more info.

That it our update for Sanapsis Svenska 1.3. If you haven’t yet, you can download it for your iPad from the Appstore. Buy once, get all future updates for free (no in-app purchases, ever)!

Play around, invite your patients to play around and most importantly - let us know what you think! We love hearing what works, what could use improvement, where we have missed a typo or what you would like to see added. You can always contact us via this website or send an email to sanapsis@puheklinikka.net (in English, Finnish or Swedish). Looking forward to hearing from you!

New icons

August 19, 2019Nana Lehtinen

Now that we have three language versions of Sanapsis, we thought it would be fun to have three different icons to display at AppStore and on your iPad. We are still in love with our color-scheme (orange, gray and white) and decided to keep things in line with that. As we also want to avoid getting mixed up with language learning apps *think flags for languages* so sticking to our trio was the obvious solution. All our apps are a collaboration of our trilingual team. However, we do play favorites..

Sanapsis

Meet Sanapsis, our original English version. You could think of it as our firstborn (twin A) if you were so inclined. This one has seen a lot of testing under different circumstances and has held up rather nicely! Plays well with others and is currently under supervision of main designer, SLP Nana.

This is our twin B, Sanapsis Suomi (Finnish). This one is the one we have most direct patient feedback on and we are oh, so grateful to everybody who has been a part of bringing it to life. At the moment this one is being polished and made better mostly by our fantastic SLP Elina.

Sanapsis Svenska

Our baby! Sanapsis Svenska (Swedish) is our latest localization and we are so exited to see it getting better with each update. First release gave you the basics and new releases will always free, as with all versions. Our Swedish version has been brought to life mostly by our talented SLP Annemari with the help of many speech language pathology students at Åbo Akademi in Turku, Finland.

Our team of SLPs (Nana, Annemari and Elina) showing off their favorites at NAC2019 (June 2019).

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