By: Dr. Ramalatha Marimuthu
(IEEE Senior Member)
IEEE
believes that Assistive Technology is an emerging field bringing the
engineers, medical practitioners and end users in close contact to
solve the problems faced by human kind in their day to day life due
to age, immobility, disability, environment and any number of other
reasons. This field is attracting the attention of Governments,
Corporates, Academia, Students, medical professionals, end users and
NGOs. The scope of bringing the end users with the latest technology
available as well as designing new systems for the customised use
of the end users is large.
Developmental
Dyslexia is the most common neuro-biological disorder affecting
children with prevalence rates ranging from 5% to 10%. This is a
chronic condition characterized by difficulties with accurate and /
or fluent word recognition, by poor spelling and decoding abilities.
This results in difficulty in learning to utilize correspondence
regularities between graphemes and phonemes and in poor phonological
awareness making the child a slow learner. Many children having this
difficulty find it impossible to cope up with the current education
system an d the teachers also find it extremely difficult to
make the children understand their teaching.Augmentative and
alternative communication (AAC) is using the
communication methods used to supplement or replace speech or writing
for those with impairments in the production or comprehension of
spoken or written language. Teaching through signs, symbols and other
visual media is a current research topic finding much interest in
developed countries.
People
with Special needs, particularly children with learning disorders are
difficult to train for career life and hence their financial
independence is difficult to attain. Our education system demands a
high degree of reading and writing skills to get a degree and train
for a job. Though Vocational rehabilitation methods are used for
training them through special education, these are not available for
the children with mild disorders who study in the normal curriculum.
Assistive
Technology provides access to the learning through the technology
such as audio book players, talking pens, talking spell checkers etc.
Presently smart phones and tablets form an important part of
students’ lives, through their ability to house a large amount of
data and applications. Storage and retrieval of data, access to web
services, multimedia applications, and communication are some of the
highly used applications. Hence in this line it is proposed to use
this technology to overcome the difficulty of reading and writing and
help the children with mild as well as acute disorders. Providing an
interface for text to speech and speech to text conversion with these
gadgets and enhancing the usage using symbol based education is the
target of this research. The easy availability of the necessary
platform in both hardware as well as software makes this application
feasible.
Educating
people with disorders to fend for themselves is a slow process and
requires a lot of efforts from the parents, teachers as well as the
child. Even then it may not be fully possible for them to overcome
the disability and lead a normal life. The objective is to
devise methods of providing them a technology assisted career
oriented education so as to make them socially and financially
independent. At the same time the disability of the children is
converted into ability by educating them through technology.
Smart phones and Tablets have become innovative tools of education in
day today life. Children are fascinated by these tools because of the
different applications on entertainment like movies, games, music
etc. Even the children who need special education find it easier to
operate these gadgets and hence it is proposed to introduce education
through these technologies. The Text to Speech conversion part of the
application will be able to convert any e - notes, e- books etc to
children understandable speech and facilitate the special children to
listen and learn rather than read and learn. The Speech to text
conversion part of the application can be used to help the child to
prepare the documentation or write examination by speaking into the
gadgets.
A
large body of research has been conducted on the relation between
phonological awareness and learning to read. Strong support has been
provided that lack of phonological awareness can cause difficulties
with the acquisition of reading and writing. Being able to
distinguish and identify the different phonemes in a word is part of
this awareness. Research in the past decades has provided ample
evidence that dyslexic children have problems with phonological
awareness and other aspects of phonological processing.
In
India special education and training centers have opened to provide
the necessary therapy and training to the children who need special
attention but they are not focused on any research to devise new
methodology for training them. Hence research on this topic to help
the trainers will be welcomed by the trainers as well as the trainees
alike. Special gadgets used for improving the education are also very
minimal. Though therapy and training methods are used to overcome
these disorders, the percentage of children benefitted is very less.
Mastering the usage of smart phones, tablets and other gadgets is not
uncommon among these children and hence educating them through these
devices would definitely be a welcome change.
Many
pioneering institutions like Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
(TIFR), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), International Institute
of Information Technology (IIIT) etc have been modeling on
Text-to-speech and Speech to text systems successfully for many
decades. For example, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR)
is conducting R & D on Indian English Text-to-Speech (TTS)
systems. Text-to-speech synthesis in Indian English is useful for
delivering messages stored in computers and web to the Indian users
unfamiliar with Standard English accent.
The
Speech and Vision Lab in IIIT is developing a speech and vision based
interface for human-computer interaction. The goal is to develop of
speech-to-text (speech input) and text-to-speech (speech output)
systems to achieve speech translation from one Indian language to
another and speech/audio information retrieval in a secure access
mode using biometrics such as speech, video etc. They also
collaborate with International organizations to work on Text to
speech and Speech to text conversion in different Indian Languages.
The
number of children affected by learning disorders has been increasing
alarmingly over the years. Individuals with dyslexia are affected
emotionally by being unable to learn which affect their social
behavior. Some time the situation is complicated by lack of awareness
and understanding on the part of the parents and teachers. The
developed countries like US, UK have recognized this neuro biological
disorder as a chronic ailment and are spending an enormous amount of
money on the research for diagnosing and training. These countries
conducted specific studies on school children to investigate the
presence of dyslexia among them. Continuous monitoring on the level
of their stress due to their educational and social difficulties
reveal the presence of dyslexia and learning disorders, the result of
which are used to identify the individuals who need special
attention. The current research in the area of reading supports the
idea that many reading difficulties stem from the child’s deficits
in phonological processing or awareness, verbal memory and rapid
naming ability. Hence mastering the sound/symbol systems involved in
reading and the necessary storage and retrieval skills required to
read and understand the printed language, can be acquired through the
current technology using smart phones and tablets.
This in turn gives a hope for the child improving their social
behavior and making them cope with their peers and contemporaries.
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