When thoughts find words and a voice, people can communicate. While talking is taken for granted by most, persons who are speech impaired can seldom convey their feelings through words. Two final-year engineering students from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Indranil Chandra and Abhinendra Singh, have racked their brains to solve the problem. The duo is inspired by physicist Stephen Hawking's resolve to communicate through machines despite being speech impaired.
When thoughts find words and a voice, people can communicate. While talking is taken for granted by most, persons who are speech impaired can seldom convey their feelings through words. Two final-year engineering students from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Indranil Chandra and Abhinendra Singh, have racked their brains to solve the problem. The duo is inspired by physicist Stephen Hawking's resolve to communicate through machines despite being speech impaired.
They have developed a prototype, 'Dhvani – Sharing a Voice,' which is a sleek headband, with an attached microphone and an electronic screen positioned in front of the wearer's eye.
Dhvani, which is an augmentative and alternative communication device, has an inbuilt database of 47,000 dictionary-based words. It helps the user in constructing a word alphabet-by-alphabet. "After the device is switched on, the alphabets flash on the screen in three groups, 'a-i,' 'j-r,' and 's-z'. The user can freeze on a sub-set of alphabets by intensely blowing onto the microphone, which is attached to sensors. The device will read the instructions given by the user as s/he blows air into the microphone. Furthermore, individual alphabets from the subset will flash on the screen and can be frozen by release of blow of breath by the user," said Singh. "After the word has been constructed (like water, food etc.), a pre-recorded audio sample from the dictionary will be played through portable speakers, so that the caregiver or the family member can hear what the user has to say."
The makers of the device have also fed in 31 audio samples of basic sentence constructions ranging from 'My name is...' to 'Can I have water?,' to 'Are you on Facebook?' in the device. "We have enhanced the prototype to include basic sentences, which will be formulated automatically, as the user constructs one word. If the user were to construct the spelling of 'water', an entire question will then get generated and played out by the device, after the user consents to playing out of the sentence, by blow of a breath," said Chandra.
According to the National Sample Survey Office, over two crore persons are disabled, of which over a crore suffer from loco motor disabilities and over twenty-one lakh are speech impaired. Persons who are speech impaired due to paralytic strokes or patients of Cerebral Palsy, Hawking's condition – Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) among other disorders, can utilise the device to talk.
Dhvani can be personalised to match the breathing intensity of the user by calibrating thresholds of blowing capacity of an individual user. Chandra and Singh submitted a proposal to work in Dhvani, under the Kalpana programme of Tata Centre for Technology and Design (TCTD) and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai. "Dhvani is one of the ten projects selected under the programme. The ten projects were shortlisted from thousand applications received in the programme," said Chandra.
"If the device goes to market for sale, it will cost under Rs8,000," said Singh.
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