Xinyu Liao

She received her bachelor's degree in industrial design from the Cleveland Institute of Arts in the US. She's been participated the St. Gobai Competition and IHA Competition. She also participated the design of Buoy for Cleveland's Central Park and the dishes plates for KFC in China, which are now in use. Her project of IHA competition were exhibited in Women's Design exhibition in the US. While studying at RCA, she set up her own design studio, and her team has designed some creative products for the Palace Museum and the Summer Palace. She is skilled at Adobe ID, PS, AI, PR, Keyshot, Soildworks and Sketchbook Pro.

YIY is a new instrument therapy helps people who have lost their speech function to regain it. A series of simple Musical Instruments are designed for them and they can be trained to recover their speech functions by playing these instruments. Speech is produced by the finely coordinated movement of the muscles of the vocal organ. It basically means the breathing organs, the tongue muscles and the lips muscles, and you need to train them first to make any vowels and consonants, The purpose of my product is to fundamentally train these basic skills.

— Due to some special reasons, such as a car accident, a fall, or a cerebrovascular disease like stroke, some people suffer from temporary or permanent loss of speech function.

— I noticed this group because my boyfriend's grandfather suffered a cerebral thrombosis last year, which caused him lose his mobility and speech function. His mobility recovered a lot this year, but his speech function still did not make a great progress. He also received brief speech therapy while in the hospital, but it was expensive and the daily training was tedious and repetitive, like a hopeless cycle. The mood is also very depressed. And he was very dependent on the help of therapist.

Design Research

— The first thing that came to mind was music, because I had tonsil surgery last year and I couldn't speak during that time. And I felt very depressed and lonely. I felt relaxed and happy only when I listened to music and played my ukulele. So I thought music would be a good place to start. As well as music is dominated by the opposite hemisphere of language, so it able to efficiently stimulate speech function.

— Since then I've been visiting a lot of pathologist, brain surgeons and psychologists who also say that music can efficiently stimulates the specch functions. I also spoke to pathologist specifically to get a detailed look at the methods and tools they use to train for language recovery.

— I found that it was all about training the vocal organs. It basically means the breathing organs, the tongue muscles and the lips muscles.

— Together with musicians and speech pathologists, I have repeatedly modified and designed these instruments. How can I design the position of the pronunciation hole that can be pressed by the tongue and produce different tones? What should the shape and size of the instrument be? What materials should the instrument be made of? and how to play the instrument to train the vocal muscles?

— YIY instrument therapy

— At the same time, I also made the corresponding using methods and music scores. Because the playing methods of these instruments are very simple, patients can learn and practice by themselves at home.

— Linguists and Speech-Language pathologists' thoughts of YIY.

— Thank you for interested in and learning about YIY.

Xinyu Liao

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Royal College of Art