Dear luggies
I am sorry for those who didn't attend this month meet(Oh .. no I am not
talking about my presentation anyway). There was a fantastic presentation by
Prof.Anil Prabhakar of EE, IITM.
His presentation was about creating a device to help verbally challenged -
those who cannot use normal communication like voice, writing etc.
He along with his team has created a device which consists of
A small box with begule board, linux on a SD card.
A small display - I thing 7inches.
Audio output
An input device which is a sensor.
Commonly these people can use only one form of input - ie. just a click or a
touch or a nod. The challange is to form sentence using this single input.
What has been done is a program which displays a keypad - similar to cell
phone. There are buttons to select a select, select a word, erase and accept.
The cursor keeps on moving from one object to next. When the cursor is on the
right object a click is pressed/touched/nodded etc. The program processes this
selection and depending on the object proceeds further - may be selecting a
word, sentence or letter etc.
If the selection is over the corresponding text is translated into speech and
played on the audio output.
The above is brief description - by no means complete. The challenges in this
project are
Cost - Should be low something like Rs.7500/-
Two audio output - one for the person and another for the teacher/listener with
independent volume control.
Good prediction of words and sentence to reduce time and effort
Optimisation of OS and application for small memory
At present they have ported Ubuntu/Linux and main program is written in
WxPython. They face lot of challenges in porting Linux and writing application.
They welcome any help.
In my opinion there is a lot of scope for developement in this project
especially to students. And I am sure even a tiny one-line contribution should
give great satisfaction considering the target persons.
I urge students to have a look at the device.
Note:I have given just a description of a thing which cannot be described
easily - something which should be seen to be understood.
Raman.P
blog:http://ramanchennai.wordpress.com/
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