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/ The INTERNET now has a personality. YOURS! See your Yahoo! Homepage. http://in.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
