Last Updated on: 18th February 2015, 05:17 pm
I saw this on the news last night. Pretty darn cool!
Some university of Toronto students have created MyVoice, a communication device to help people who have had a stroke or who have whatever communication difficulty. What makes this thing uber cooler than any communication board you could ever carry are two big things: It’s on a regular ol’ smartphone, and it has GPS in it, so it brings up custom lists of words depending on where you are. So, if you walk into a Tim Hortons, you probably won’t have to talk about hospitals or bus stations or the like. You probably want a coffee and a doughnut. But if you’re in the hospital, you might have to ask where Dr. Brown is, or ask for directions to the aphasia clinic or something like that. Isn’t that, like, totally cream of cool?
It’s also hella cheaper than other communication aids, and can be customized using their website, and it can be done remotely. Again, super awesome cream of cool!
The only thing I don’t like about it, which I hope might change in the future, is it doesn’t seem to allow for you to add words on the fly. So, say you’re in a Tim Hortons, and you go to order a coffee, and you drop your wallet, if you haven’t added “Can you please help me get my wallet?” you are rendered mute. So you kinda have to plan ahead, which is sorta dumb. Who plans their interactions in advance?
But it does say you can download pictures into it and label them, so maybe the dude on the second video in this video series wasn’t as clear as he could have been.
And guess who’s voicing this thing, or is a choice of voice? Susan, the non-blagger! Hopefully nobody who has a stroke has a “blag.”
Yeah, awesome!
