The app can work offline. You can download it on your tablet or mobile phone. Also, users can switch between two languages — English and Hindi — to speak through the app.
In order to help children with speech difficulties, a team from IDC School of Design from IIT-Bombay launched Jellow Communicator, an Android-based app, last week.
Talking about the genesis of the app, Sudha Srinivasan, post-doctoral fellow at IDC, said, "In 2015 for the first six months a research study was conducted where I interviewed over 30 children who have speech difficulties, and I also spoke to a therapist. The research work helped to understand the problems that children would face while navigating the app. We wanted to make the data easily available and icons recognisible for the children. The next six months, we conducted a detailed testing of the app. Slowly, it was developed with nine main categories of icons in the home page and over 800 sub-category icons."
Shruti Gupta, second year student at IIT-B, who developed the software, said, "The unique feature of Jellow is that the content of the app has been developed keeping in mind the socio-cultural context of India. The challenge is in optimising the app for three different screen sizes."
The app can work offline. You can download it on your tablet or mobile phone. Also, users can switch between two languages — English and Hindi — to speak through the app. The app has approximately 8,200 inbuilt sentences, and a serial keyboard in case the user wants to write sentences, which are not already mentioned.
Jellow Communicator can be used by children suffering from cerebral palsy, autism, Down's Syndrome, and brain injury. It can also be used by adults who have lost their speech following a stroke.
The groundwork for the app began in 2004, and the updated app was launched last week. According to the team, it was conceptualised for a project with Microsoft Design Expo, and they were not able to practically implement the app, more than a decade ago as technology was not so advanced.
Ravi Poovaiah, IIT Professor, said, "We restarted the work on the app one-and-a-half-year back. The new technology like touch-screen mobiles, tablets have helped us to practically execute the app which is simple to access and can be used anytime. The cost of these technologies have also reduced."
Microsoft Design Expo and the e-kalpa project sponsored under National Mission on Education through ICT by Ministry of Human Resource Development supported the development of Jellow.
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