ProjectProposal-TonyLai
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Problem Description:
Due to Cerebral Palsy and other health conditions, the use of communication board as an assistant technology to help those who lack the ability to speak and efficient use of hands is a fairly common phenomenon in the disabled community. There are two general kinds of communication board: 1) a paper communication board, which has many words and phrases on the board, and the user can point to the ones he/she desires to express, and 2) a electronic communication board, which is an electronic device with many buttons that mounts to different words and phrase, and the device will speak aloud the message upon clicks on the button. While the paper communication board is extremely cheap and can be easily produced and personalized by non-experts, it requires another person to interpret the user’s message. On the other hand, even though the electronic communication board can speak aloud the user’s message, it is very costly and requires certain level of expertise of the device to limitedly personalize the device. An ideal device for people who uses communication board would be one that is cheap, can speak aloud messages, and can be easily personalized. However, due to the structure of the current electronic communication boards, there is a limit as to how much the price can be lowered and how easily the device can be personalized.
Solution Description:
One way that we can make such communication board would be to create the traditional paper communication board using the Anoto pen technology.
Using a digital paper with pre-printed grids, the user can have the communication board to speak aloud his/her messages that were pre-programmed in another device (a laptop for example) by simply clicking the small box at the bottom right of the grid. In the laptop, there will be a database of drawings that corresponds to particular sounds files that the user has previously chosen as his/her message. All that the user will have to do when he/she is creating the communication board would be to draw the symbol that corresponds to the desired word or phrase in each grid. Using image comparison, the system will be able to find the corresponding sound file in the database and play it. The advantage about this approach is that the user can easily create many communication boards and use them for different situation. For example, there can be a “friend board”, which consist of informal words such as slangs, and a “formal board”, which consist of words and phrases more suitable for a business setting. The population that this system will be able to benefit is going to be the current and future communication board users. The fact that the users will be able to easily create their own board and the system is relatively cheaper will be appealing to the current electronic communication board user, while the ability to speak aloud messages without having to pay much more will be attractive to current paper communication board user.
