I built this for my dad
NeuroSpark is speech and language practice for adults after a stroke. It exists because of one person, and almost everything in it changed because of what happened when he used it.
After my father's stroke, the hardest part to watch wasn't the things he couldn't do. It was the moments when he knew exactly what he wanted to say and couldn't reach the word. The thought was all there. The route to it wasn't.
That's aphasia, and the thing nobody warns you about is the arithmetic of it. Speech therapy is an hour or two a week if you're lucky with scheduling and insurance. Everything else — the actual hours where practice would happen — is at home, with family, with no plan. We were told practice between sessions mattered enormously. We were not told what to do in them.
So it was photocopied worksheets that somebody had to remember to make, done at a kitchen table, with nobody sure whether an answer counted. I started building something so that the practice would be there whether or not I had the time that week to prepare it.
What it turned into
Short sessions you do out loud. You say the answer instead of tapping it, because saying it is the part conversation actually needs — and it's the part paper can't practice. A guide voice runs the session, so a person can do it alone if they want to, without a family member having to run it for them.
The difficulty moves. If word finding is the hard part on a given day, the session shifts toward word finding; support fades as it stops being needed and comes back when it is. Sessions are deliberately short, because fatigue after a stroke is real and a session that runs too long undoes the good the first five minutes did.
Everything here was found the same way
I watched him play, wrote down every place the app got in his way, and fixed them. That list is the actual development history:
- —He answered a question about jobs with "plumbing" and the app marked it wrong. It was looking for "plumber." That is not a wrong answer, and a person who has just fought to produce a word should never be told it was.
- —He said the right word and it wasn't heard, because the microphone was still closed while the app finished talking. Now the app waits for him instead of the other way round.
- —He said the right word imperfectly and got marked wrong. Now a near-miss on the sounds counts as the reach it is.
- —He wanted to stop for a minute and couldn't find the pause button, because it was sitting underneath the header. And the text was too small, so now he can make it bigger mid-session.
None of those are clever features. They're the difference between a person finishing a session and a person deciding the thing is broken and not coming back to it. You only find them by sitting next to somebody while they use it.
What I am not
I'm not a speech-language pathologist, and NeuroSpark is not medical treatment. It is practice — the between-sessions part — and it is meant to sit alongside care from a licensed clinician, never to replace it. If speech changes are new or sudden, that's a doctor, not an app. If you're working with a speech therapist, show them anything here and let them tell you which parts suit the person you're practicing with. They know things I don't.
Why so much of it is free
Because the version of this that would have helped us most was the one we could have found and used the same evening, without a signup, at eleven o'clock at night when we finally had a minute. The games play free in the browser. The practice pack is a PDF with no email gate — print it, copy it, hand it to your support group or your therapist.
If you're in the middle of this
If you're the family member who just got handed a discharge packet and no plan, I know exactly where you are. Try a session with the person you're caring for. If something in it gets in their way, tell me — that's how every part of this got fixed, and it's still the only way I find out.
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