£316,110 Innovate UK grant for speech and language therapy research
SuperPenguin ·
Our Biomedical Catalyst project will develop AI documentation that preserves speech errors as clinical evidence, alongside home-practice monitoring.
Innovate UK backs our next research project
BeneTalk Ltd, the company behind SuperPenguin, has been awarded a £316,110 grant through Innovate UK's Biomedical Catalyst programme. The funding supports research into AI documentation for speech and language therapy, alongside ways to monitor home practice.
The project runs from July 2026 to September 2027. Its focus is practical: helping therapists prepare documentation while preserving the details of a child's speech that matter to their clinical work. The grant contributes to a total eligible project cost of £451,586.
Keeping the child's speech in the record
The documentation prototype will be designed to preserve a child's actual speech errors as clinical evidence. For example, if a child says “wabbit” rather than “rabbit”, the aim is to retain what the child said.
This distinction is central to the project. A record that replaces the child's pronunciation with the intended word could lose the very detail the therapist needs to review. We will investigate how AI can support documentation while keeping that evidence available.
Clinicians will review and approve the documentation before it reaches the record. Their review is part of the planned workflow, with the technology supporting the preparation of the record.
Connecting appointments and home practice
A second part of the research will explore home-practice monitoring. Together, these areas will investigate how information from therapy and practice at home can support a therapist's work.
The project will develop and test prototypes. The funding announcement describes the work we plan to carry out and does not report study results.
Testing the approach with NHS partners
Validation with three partner NHS trusts and a usability study are planned from spring 2027. These stages will help us assess the prototypes and how people use them.
We are grateful to Innovate UK for supporting this research. The funding gives us the opportunity to develop the approach and put it through structured testing.
This project is co-funded by Innovate UK, the UK's innovation agency, through Biomedical Catalyst.