Australian Stuttering Research Centre

Seeing your child have a condition that you don't know how to help them with was an extremely difficult thing to deal with emotionally. As a parent, you worry about how your children will have a happy life when they grow up. So we'd been on a journey of 6 or 7 months, and we’d sought treatment with various speech pathologists in that time. I realised that we were in a limited time window to make an impact on our ability to treat his stuttering. So I really felt a strong urgency to work with speech therapists that really understood stuttering and really understood working with children as well.

For 30 years, the Australian Stuttering Research Centre has been working to better understand stuttering and to improve the lives of those affected by it. One of our significant contributions is the Lidcombe Program treatment for children, which was developed through rigorous research and is now used internationally. It has changed the lives of thousands of children and their families.

That looks like a whale shark, kind of.

It transformed, I think, his quality of life and really eased a burden that I otherwise felt like I carried as a father, and it dramatically improved our quality of life.

Our goal is to develop effective early interventions that can be offered to children as soon as they begin to stutter. We're also focused on supporting speech pathologists who work with adults who stutter, particularly when anxiety is part of the picture and additional psychological strategies may be needed. 

The iGlebe program was the first fully automatized, fully individualized treatment program in any area of health. The program assesses people at the start from within algorithms inside the program, and then plans an individual treatment program for the person. Because the iGlebe program is fully automatised and fully individualised, it doesn't require clinical psychologists to support the program. That means we can see as many end users who wish to access it simultaneously around the globe.

UTS has supported us along our journey so far with research, infrastructure and personnel and for the future, we plan to make further inroads into this global public health issue.

Our vision is to use AI to make cost free, online treatments for stuttering accessible to people around the world, regardless of where they live or what language they speak. Everyone deserves the opportunity to communicate freely, confidently, and effectively in their own way.