Indian Teenager Invents an Affordable Device That Helps the Speechless Speak

A teenager from India has invented a portable device that allows a computer to construct compete sentences from the breaths of speech-impaired persons. The 16 year old has developed a generic, fast, lightweight and portable device that can be produced cheaply in large quantity. The device, named ‘Talk’ records the user's exhales and transforms these to form full sentences. 

It has only two major parts: a wearable sensor placed near the nose or mouth and a processing unit and speaker about the size of an average smartphone.

Arsh Shah Dilbagi, the young inventor, says that the device will monitor and convert two different type of exhales. These exhales will be differentiated by their different intensities and duration of time. The intensity and duration of the breaths will be fed to the processor, which will determine the specific breath pattern and essentially compute them into a binary coded language - short exhales are ‘dots’ and long exhales are labeled ‘dashes.’

The device has shown some very promising results and has a 99% accuracy average. Arsh and his research and development team are now working to expand the Talk's multi-language capabilities. It's to be sold for less than US$100.

Talk isn't the first augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device on the market. Steven Hawking uses a similar yet different AAC device that reads and computes eye movement. Most of the current AAC devices are very large, bulky and expensive.

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Source-Medindia