Researchers from IIT Gandhinagar and AIIMS New Delhi, working with other institutions, have developed a computerised, Hindi-language screening platform to help clinicians spot aphasia, the speech and language disorder that commonly follows a stroke. The tool, called the Computerized Hindi Aphasia Screening Platform (CHASP), is aimed squarely at resource-constrained settings where early diagnosis is often delayed.

The work comes into focus on World Stroke Day (29 October), as clinicians and public health planners look for practical ways to catch post-stroke complications earlier.

Why aphasia screening is hard in India

Aphasia is caused by damage to the parts of the brain that handle language. It can affect how a person speaks, understands speech, reads and writes, and experts estimate that it affects nearly one in three stroke survivors.

Diagnosis today typically relies on expensive neuroimaging or on lengthy pen-and-paper language assessments administered by trained specialists. In many Indian hospitals and district facilities, neither is easy to access quickly, and most widely used assessment batteries were designed for English speakers rather than native Hindi speakers.

How CHASP works

CHASP is built for native Hindi speakers and combines several digital elements:

• Interactive audio-visual tasks: acoustic, visual and reading tasks presented on a computer, through which the platform measures how accurately and how quickly a patient responds.
• Sensor-embedded base station: a dedicated hardware unit that captures the patient’s responses.
• Heart-rate monitoring: photoplethysmography-derived interbeat-interval signals are used as a marker of cognitive load and physiological stress while the patient completes each task.

By reading response accuracy, response speed and physiological stress together, the platform aims to pick up subtle processing delays that a conventional paper test may miss.

What the clinical testing found

According to the researchers, CHASP successfully distinguished post-stroke patients from healthy individuals during clinical testing. Its acoustic task module was also able to separate stroke survivors with aphasia from those without it, by detecting subtle processing delays and stress markers. The study reports that CHASP scores correlated with measures from the Western Aphasia Battery, an established clinical assessment for aphasia.

The study, titled “Computerized Platform in Hindi Language: Exploring Its Use in Aphasia Screening”, was published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine. Its authors are Paromita Mitra, Shipra Kethwalia, Rhythm Makkar, Ruchita Hazrati, Rahul Chhatlani, Geetesh Kumar Singh, Ashima Nehra and Uttama Lahiri.

Why it matters for digital health

India’s stroke burden is rising, and post-stroke rehabilitation depends on identifying language deficits early so that speech and language therapy can begin on time. A screening tool in the patient’s own language that runs on a computer, rather than requiring imaging or a specialist-administered paper battery, could help neurology teams, rehabilitation centres and district hospitals triage patients faster.

The platform is still at the research stage, and wider clinical validation and deployment pathways will determine how quickly it reaches hospitals. But CHASP adds to a growing body of Indian-language digital diagnostics designed around local patients, an area that is becoming increasingly important as hospitals digitise care and as India builds out its national digital health infrastructure.

Photo: Timothy A. Gonsalves / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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