Bloomington, Indiana

Working out of the Indiana University Research Park at the Showers Center in Bloomington, a small company founded by three Indiana University professors has quietly been developing new technology for people with speech and hearing problems. Communications Disorders Technology Inc. was founded in 1989 after several years of work on the use of speech-recognition technology for speech training by Charles Watson, Diane Kewley-Port and Daniel Maki.

The group's early research was supported by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a computer-based speech trainer for children with articulation disorders. That system eventually became ISTRA — the Indiana Speech Training Aid. The company actually was formed to improve and commercialize ISTRA, and over the years it has received 10 different grants totaling $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health and the Small Business Innovation Research program of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Now the company has four distinct computer software products on CD-ROM, and a marketing effort is under way to help the company move from an unknown research firm to a profitable commercial enterprise. "It's about time for us to make something happen," said Watson, who came to IU in 1983 as chairman of the Speech and Hearing Department. "Our expertise has been in designing and developing systems, not marketing. It takes a lot of marketing and we have to figure out where that is going to come from. But the markets for our products potentially are substantial."

Watson's partners include Maki, the chairman of IU's math department; Kewley-Port, whose specialty is perception of speech and complex, nonspeech sounds; and Jonathan Dalby, who is manager of research and development for the company. There are several other full- and part-time employees on the CDT staff.

Earlier this month, the staff traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive the prestigious SBIR Tibbitts Award for achievement. Without federal funding for innovative research companies, products such as those CDT develops may never see the light of day. "What the SBIR and NIH do is absolutely fabulous," Dalby said. "The funding helps great ideas get turned into real products that have the chance to become a commercial success. Traditional funding would never work for many of these kinds of ideas."

Dalby said the most difficult part is not creating the product, but marketing it in a way that it makes it commercially. "Many SBIR companies are in the same boat as us," he said. "We don't have the expertise on the business and marketing end." Regardless, CDT's four products are making noise in the speech and hearing world. ISTRA, the computer-based speech training aid for people with articulation disorders, has been marketed since 1994. HearSay, an English pronunciation training and accent reduction system (in versions of Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Spanish, so far), first was released in 1995. A patented hearing-screening device called Home Hearing Evaluator, produced in collaboration with another firm in North Carolina, recently was developed. You-Said-It, a system for teaching English to adults with developmental disabilities, is due out in December. That product is in the final stages of development, with testing being done at the Stone Belt Center in Bloomington.

Another project to create a system for teaching early literacy skills to children also is in the development phase. A team of investigators with expertise in speech and hearing sciences, mathematics, engineering, linguistics, psychology and cognitive science, instructional systems technology, graphic arts and computer programming has been formed to carry out that work.

The HearSay program has been licensed for sale in Japan and soon will be licensed for sale in China.

All the products are designed to run on today's fast personal computers that have a microphone. "Computer speed is not a problem anymore," Watson said. "We always have known that improvement of speech and language is very difficult to achieve without one-on-one instruction. A computer can do a lot of that, or at least be a supplement to therapy." The systems often are used by speech and hearing professionals as training aids, but they can be purchased by individuals as well.