Talk by your breath

There is approximately 1.4% of world population suffering from developmental disabilities such as LIS and ALS. The disease causes them to almost entirely paralyze and disables them to communicate except using an AAC device. Due to the lack of expression, most of them can live only for 20 years or below. Current AAC devices are costly, slow and bulky. Therefore Arsh Shah Dilbagi, a 16-year-old boy from India, decided to construct an affordable, faster and portable AAC device — Talk.

First time using breath as the medium. Talk converts exhalation into binary Morse code by using the MEMS Microphone, i.e. short exhales as ‘dots’ and long exhales as ‘dashes’, the words/sentences are synthesized. It allows the person to communicate in English and give specific commands/phrases in 9 different voices.

In future, he would like to add auto-predictions to the programme and integrate Talk with modern technology like Google Glass. He hopes the device makes it convenient to people with developmental disabilities to help them live better.

Source: Google Science Fair