“Patient will follow 2-step directions with 90% accuracy within 2 weeks.”

It’s probably one of the first goals I ever wrote as a new clinician. And like many of us, I pulled out a workbook to help my patient meet it. We underlined a word that was a drink. We closed our eyes, then looked at the door. Functional, right? 🙄

What I didn’t think about back then was why this goal was so common, or what “functional” really meant for my patient.

The goal itself isn’t bad. We follow directions all the time:

• Check in at the desk and show your ID before voting.
• Print your full name, initial here, then sign at the bottom.
• Add the chicken stock after you sauté the onions and garlic.

But my workbooks weren’t actually helping patients follow directions in real life. They were targeting reading comprehension, attention to detail, or motor sequencing–without addressing the auditory comprehension challenges my patients with aphasia faced in therapy, at home, or in the community.

You see, people with aphasia often rely heavily on context to compensate for comprehension gaps, even when receptive skills are relatively strong. The content words come through, but grammar words—before, after, first, then—are fuzzy. 🌫️

That insight led me to build the Follow activity in the Advanced Comprehension Therapy app: a no-context task with 16 levels of difficulty that forces attention to every word. I loved it because it strengthened attention and built self-awareness—often the first step toward progress.

But clinicians wanted something more functional. Touching the big, yellow, striped triangle requires precision, but it isn’t exactly what you hear in daily life. So when we designed a new treatment for the Virtual Rehab Center, we went back to the drawing board...

🆕 Following Multi-Step Directions

Following Multi-Step Directions works on 2- and 3-step directions using real-life situations (everyday conversational requests) while still requiring true comprehension, not guesswork based on context. 🙌

Check out this video to see it in action:

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What SLPs love about this treatment:

• "Slower" option adds pauses for extra processing time
• The hint shows the text of the audio with bolded keywords
• 10 levels of complexity, adjusting foils, order, and number
• Multiple voices mimic real-world listening demands

Like all our treatments, data is tracked and written automagically into a SOAP note. And it can be assigned for home practice at no cost to patients. 🫶

This is just the latest of over 50 treatments inside the Virtual Rehab Center, and many more are coming this year – each one as thoughtfully designed as this one. That’s the Tactus Therapy difference. ✨

If you haven’t explored the Virtual Rehab Center yet, this is a great place to start.
👉 Start a free trial and try Following Multi-Step Directions with your own patients.

Let me know how it goes!

Best,

-Megan

P.S. Did you see our research summaries about treating auditory comprehension, how attention and aphasia interact, or why awareness matters so much? 👀