There’s a growing need for high-quality Vietnamese speech data from children with phonological and speech disorders. Without it, it’s difficult to build AI tools that can truly support early diagnosis and treatment. This gap is exactly what brought our team to Children’s Hospital 2 on Thursday, December 11, 2025.
We arrived with a small team from the URA research group, including Assoc. Prof. Dr. Quản Thành Thơ, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hà Thị Thanh Hương, and several student researchers involved in the VINIF project. Doctors from the hospital joined us for the session.
We began with a presentation that walked through the project’s goals, the technical challenges, and why a collaboration with the hospital is essential. The presentation focused on a simple but pressing issue: Vietnam currently lacks real-world speech data from young children with phonological and speech sound disorders. Because of this, both clinicians and researchers face limits when developing or testing tools that could support early intervention. The project hopes to change that. With the hospital’s help, we aim to collect structured, ethically approved speech data and move toward developing AI systems that can assist doctors in diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment planning.
After the presentation, we shifted into a discussion about how the collaboration could work in practice. We talked through data collection steps, how consent and ethics would be handled, and how to protect patient privacy. These details matter, especially for a project involving children. The hospital team appreciated the careful planning and asked thoughtful questions that helped refine our approach.
What encouraged us most was the hospital’s reaction. They were genuinely impressed by the project’s long-term potential and were enthusiastic about participating. Their openness made the meeting feel like more than a formal introduction—it felt like the beginning of real teamwork.
There’s still a lot ahead, but after this visit, the project feels more grounded and within reach. If everything goes well, VINIF won’t just produce research outputs. It will help create tools that make it easier for children with speech difficulties to receive the care they need. And that’s a future worth working toward.