Attendence of Motor Speech Conference 2019: 'Speech therapy, is it worth the effort?'

In October, I had an appointment with the group at the Antwerp University of Hospital (UZA) to discuss my secondment next year there. After the meeting, they hosted a conference 'Motor Speech Conference 2019' and invited me to attend. It turned out that it was a very useful conference for me since my project is about dysarthric speech and I plan to find an easier solution of speech intelligibility measurement for therapists, who work in the hospital.

Traditionally, the motor speech conferences offer a balanced mix of state-of-the-art knowledge, national and international expertise, practical information, recent and clinically relevant study results and an update on ongoing research. The focus of this edition was on speech therapy in motor speech disorders, which is often very challenging. Special attention was paid to articulation therapy and computerized treatment modalities. Other topics were cerebral palsy, prosody, special conditions and communicative participation.

I also met two ESRs, Viviana who studies at UZA and Thomas Rolland who was there for his secondment. One thing I found really nice and useful for ESRs is that we can do secondments at different Universities/companies and cooperate with each other. I am now really looking forward to my secondment in Antwerp.