Occupational Therapy (OT) encompasses all of our meaningful daily activities that we want or need to do on a daily basis. Some of these activities, or “Occupations,” are also commonly referred to as “self-care” and include bathing, dressing, grooming, toileting, and eating. OT also helps with other daily tasks such as walking, shopping, lifting, cooking, and many other daily activities of life.

Aphasia is the impairment or absence of comprehension and/or communication skills as a result of an injury to the brain’s language center. It can apply to spoken or written words and numbers and is most commonly associated with stroke and brain injury. It is characterized by a disturbance of the comprehension and formulation of language. It is loss of language, NOT cognition. 

Apraxia is the difficulty and/or inability to execute purposeful and coordinated movements even though the person has the desire to speak and the mouth and tongue muscles are physically able to form words. This often results in rearranged sounds within words. 

The ability to obtain and sustain appropriate attention to a task while filtering out irrelevant stimulation in order to focus on the information that is important in the moment. This can be influenced by motivation, self-esteem, sensory integration, practice, language difficulties and any existing diagnosis. This can result in difficulties learning new skills, successful social interactions, learning and broadening a repertoire of play skills, inability to follow instructions, receptive (understanding) language, and auditory processing (accurately understanding verbal information).

Cognitive rehabilitation services address difficulties in areas such as attention, memory, organization, visuoperception, problem-solving, self-monitoring, and self-awareness in order to maximize an individual’s safety, daily functioning, independence, social participation, and quality of life. Treatment of this area includes increasing awareness of deficits, goal setting, compensation, internalization of strategies so they become more automatic and generalize to wider context. 

Dysarthria is difficulty in articulating words due to a disturbance in the central nervous system often resulting in slow and slurred speech. Treatment involves intensive focus on oral-motor skill development.