iName it, Our App for People with Aphasia, Goes Global

Smarty Ears updates its iName it app to support iOS 7 and adds two new languages, Spanish and Portuguese.

Dallas, TX, October 29, 2013. Smarty Ears is excited to announce that it has updated its app iName it, adding Spanish and Portuguese. iName it came out in 2012 and was first developed for the one million English speakers in the United States who live with some form of aphasia, and who have trouble finding the right word for an item, action or thing. Now it will serve speakers of two more languages.

Since each person is different, creating an app that addresses everyone’s difficulty level was a challenge. The clinicians behind it developed a universal approach that suits all types of users, combining several strategies that help patients who struggle in a wide variety of areas. The app has been effective with patients at different levels of communication.

iName it gives users a simple, systematic way to retrieve just the right word, using realistic visual scenes and five evidence-based cueing strategies. Speech therapists can combine the cueing options to meet each patient’s needs, whatever their level, and each target word can be elicited with one or more cues.

iName it was created by certified speech-language pathologists Elizabeth Begley and Mary Pitti, under the guidance of seasoned app designer and speech-language pathologist Barbara Fernandes, Smarty Ears CEO. Smarty Ears has developed over sixty apps for children and adults with communication difficulties, in a variety of languages.

“We’re excited to make these updates to our iName it app for iPad. By adding Spanish and Portuguese, we can now provide a tool to thousands more people around the world who struggle with aphasia.”

Mary Pitti, Clinic Program Director and Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, Ithaca College

“This app has become an essential tool for SLPs who work with people with aphasia. We zero in on basic words people use every day. We’ve had great feedback from speech-language pathologists in Brazil who already use one or more of our 15 apps in Portuguese, and many of them urged us to make a Portuguese version of iName it.”

Barbara Fernandes

Smarty Ears has earned the “Teachers with Apps Certified Developer” certification, which recognizes developers who consistently create educational apps that are exemplary in content, presentation, execution and overall user experience.

About Smarty Ears

Smarty Ears is an award-winning developer of educational iPad apps for children and adults, each designed to make learning fun. All apps are developed by certified speech-language pathologists and teachers with years of experience. Smarty Ears was founded in 2009 by Barbara Fernandes, an ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist, and was the first company to create speech and language therapy apps for mobile devices.