Development of a Location and Situation Based Augmentative and Alternative Communication Service

Mobile Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) applications have great advantages in portability. Choosing the appropriate AAC board for a user’s current location or situation is a very difficult and hard job for people with cerebral palsy, motor disabilities, or intellectual disabilities due to their limited motor skills or cognitive abilities. We developed a location and situation-based AAC service that automatically recommends a board suitable for the AAC users’ current location and communication situation. Through a survey to identify places that those people with disabilities and their facilitators consider important, 20 built-in place type AAC boards were developed. The users can also create their own customized AAC boards for the specific locations where they visit frequently. The built-in and customized AAC boards for locations may consist of situation sub-boards with the order of communication contexts in the locations. We developed an algorithm to recommend the most appropriate location and situation-based AAC board from the built-in and customized boards based on the user’s current location and communication context in that location. The location and situation-based AAC service is expected to improve the convenience of AAC users who have difficulties in using AAC applications due to their limited motor skills or cognitive abilities, and to facilitate the independent life of those AAC users.