Independent Word Discovery for People with Aphasia

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices help people with speech-language impairments due to aphasia express themselves more independently and fluently. However, current AACs are still limited in that they must be pre-programmed with common words or phrases prior to use. When people with aphasia encounter unexpected and unplanned situations or contexts, they may have difficulty using their AAC device to generate the desired speech. We present the design of an AAC application that uses image recognition technology to give people with aphasia just in time access to words. Our design automatically carries out an extensive retrieval of words associated with a captured image. The relevance, accuracy and usefulness of each word can then be verified independently by the user through an intensive retrieval of images associated with each word.