Those suffering from severe disabilities such as motor neuron or Parkinson’s disease have great difficulty in communicating with others. There may be hope with a new device that has been designed by a sixteen year old student. This device holds a lot of promise and can possibly let people with these diseases communicate with others just by using their breath.
Converting Nose Breaths into Morse Code
Given the name “Talk”, it is a device that works by identifying short air bursts to be Morse code. This code is then converted into sentences and speech, helping people with serious paralysis to correspond with others.
How it works?
The way this device works is by identifying air someone exhales in Morse code; a short burst of air and another being a slightly longer air burst. This assists in mimicking the dots and dashes action present in the Morse code. The breaths are received in a tube attached right under the nose of a person and the tube in turn connects to one external device.
Use of synthesized voices
The job of this external device is to convert the air bursts into different words or sentences and then those are read out aloud. The device stores 9 types of synthesized voices and any one of those can be used for reading out the words and sentences as per user’s preference. “Talk” also comes with a 2nd mode in which user is allowed to speak using some particular commands and phrases.
Viable option for people with communication disabilities
Successful results were achieved in tests done on people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, ALS and SEM, which is quite promising for such problems, who face problems in communicating with others in their daily lives. There are future plans to integrate this device with other technologies such as Google Glass to make things easier for those suffering from developmental disabilities.
Out of the total population of the world almost 1.4% people have some kind of disorder which makes regular communication a very difficult task. Additionally, the other devices available today are bulky as well as very expensive and are not the ideal alternative to normal speech.
Summary
“Talk” hopes to improve this situation and become a viable option that people can use. The tests performed on it so far have been quite successful and in the coming days we can expect to see it being used frequently by many people. This promising new device has also been selected for the Google’s Global Science Fair 2014 project.
