Many adults who have had normal communication skills throughout their lives, find their communication compromised by an acquired illness, trauma or disorder. This can have a major effect on their wellbeing. Although we may not be able to cure some of these diseases or impairments, there are lots of strategies we can use to improve communication.       

The Acquired Difficulties area of the icommunicate website has been broken into 4 parts:   

Stroke or Cerebral Vascular Accident (CVA)

This section will focus on the effects of a stroke and how we can use a number of different strategies to improve communication. A stroke often causes damage to the parts of the brain responsible for speech and language.  If functioning cannot be restored we need to find compensatory strategies to overcome the difficulties with communication.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

This section will look at the effect of brain injury and its impact on communication, planning, attention and memory.  By using many different, and often simple, compensatory strategies you can facilitate communication, as well as many other cognitive functions.

Progressive Neurological Diseases

The impact of these diseases can be quite devastating. Diseases such as Parkinsons disease, Motor Neurone disease, and Multiple Sclerosis can have long term effect on communication skills. However, there are many strategies that can help improve or stabilize communication and the use of technology is now also commonplace with these disorders.

Assistive Communication (AAC)

We also have a section on our site dedicated to Assistive Technology and communication.  This section focuses on a growing area, where the use of technology is helping many adults with acquired difficulties to communicate more effectively. The use of assistive communication devices, both hi-tech and lo-tech, are very much part the icommunicate philosophy.  This website is all about communication and a total communication environment.  This means we focus on every modality that can be used to facilitate communication.  At icommunicate we plan to have a heavy focus on assistive communication and technology. 

Although we will ebdeavour to give you lots of valuable tools to facilitate communication, if you have the opportunity to see an experienced speech and language pathologist/therapist then this will provide you with extra therapy to run in parallel with these strategies.

To find more information and downloadable resources, visit our Resource Centre, and to look at, and purchase books related to Adult Acquired Communication dificulties, visit our Online Bookshop.