Developing Alternative and Augmentative Communication Devices

Many impairments such as cerebral palsy and mental retardation can impair the ability to use speech to communicate. Alternative communication forms such as signing, and spelling, word and picture charts are typically used in India to facilitate communication and to support their development of language. While few voice output devices and software packages have been developed, the technological excellence and innovation that Indians are renowned for has made little impact in this area.

There is no doubt that the IT world has the desire and the ability to create solutions. The problem has been in the translation of rehabilitation issues into the appropriate technical language and adequate knowledge on both sides to move from ideas to workable product. Chetana, with our team of experts in various fields of technology as well as learning and development, is in a unique position to fill this need.

Our journey in this area began when Vidyasagar (originally the Spastic Society of India) and IIT Madras jointly organised a three-day conference & workshop called Silent revolution on Augmentative and Alternative Communications (AAC) in December 2005. The goal of the workshop was to come up with affordable (high-tech/low tech) devices that can be used for communication by children with cerebral palsy (the children have poor control over motor skills and many are non-verbal).

Several viable designs and ideas for designs came out of the workshop and the faculty and senior students at Vidya Sagar prioritized them from their perspective. Chetana has undertaken to support the development of these designs and ideas from the conceptual stage to actual working prototypes.

Hope

Hope was a AAC system designed by one of the teams at the workshop. Conceptualized as a one touch communication chat tool, HOPE was to run on the simputer making it both affordable, and portable. The team from IIT Madras - Dinil, Samuel, Nisha, Deivapalan and Rao began work in December directly after the conference and had a working model available for the school for testing by Easter. By June, the first bugs were worked out and another round of testing was underway. Convinced that we had a viable system, we teamed with Innovate Software Solutions to port the program to the Simputer in October, 2006. The Simputer testing showed us quickly that the children were unable to function on the small screen size and currently we have it running on the Mobilis.
Where next? Prediction needs to be built into the program and there is some fine tuning that still needs to be done before we are have completed the project. Hope uses Linux we encourage all Linux programmers to join us in adding value to the program.

Access Switches

Non-contact switch
Our latest innovation is a non-contact switch designed for children who had limited movements or poor tactual sensitivity making the traditional solutions inadequate. The switch imitates the left mouse click by sensing the proximity of the human body to the metal plate. It has an activation range of about 6 inches and a single tone sound that tells the user that the switch has been activated. The audio feedback was particularly useful as many children have poor tactual feedback and are unable to tell if they have actually pressed a switch when they used traditional switches. Kids are using it easily as a head switch and are able to use parts of their bodies (like their toes or elbows) that they can't see as the audio feedback tells them when they have activated it. We are currently working on stabilizing the device with a micro controller and setting it up so that the user can manipulate the controls (such as sound and distance of activation) easily.