A new five-year, $3.1 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) will fund a Penn State University project to investigate ways to improve speech communications for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Specifically, researchers are focusing on how people living with ALS communicate with their “communication partners,” including spouses and family members, who often also serve as caregivers.

In a March 18 news announcement from Penn State, Jimin Lee, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders, commented on existing interventions that usually focus on trying to help people with ALS to improve their speech. The neurodegenerative nature of ALS causes slurred speech.

“We found that existing speech interventions are burdensome and have limited effectiveness, especially with people who have ALS, because as the disease progresses, speech declines,” Lee said. “We want to develop another tool that would augment existing interventions to improve their speech communication.”

Lee and other researchers — including Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders Anne Olmstead and Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders Navin Viswanathan, the other principal investigators — will be investigating “how people with ALS and their partners communicate as they develop interventions,” the announcement said. “In a preliminary study, the researchers found evidence that speech intelligibility improves in communicative interactions when compared to other situations.”

Researchers collaborated with the greater Philadelphia chapter of the ALS Association to work with “pairs of speakers with ALS and their communication partners from across the eastern half of the country.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers pivoted to collect data remotely, a process that “turned out to be a positive one, allowing the researchers to reach more participants with ALS, even after pandemic restrictions eased.”

The remote research process also worked well for participants, who were able to continue on the project without needing to travel.

“Furthermore, in our proposed research, we will be able to recruit participants who are further along in their disease,” Viswanathan said.

“With this research, we aim to improve daily communications between people with ALS and their partners while reducing the burden on people with ALS to improve speech communication by themselves,” Olmstead said in the announcement.