A few days ago, the entertainment world was moved by the news of Bruce Willis' retirement from acting due to the unexpected diagnosis of aphasia he received. Aphasia is a progressive and degenerative disease of the use of language. The person who suffers from it begins to have serious difficulties in expressing orally and in writing, and the causes of this disorder are diverse.
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Just like the actor, there are millions of people in the world who daily suffer from this limiting condition and many of them cannot develop professionally because their disability segregates them from the world of work, or at least from those activities that involve the intensive use of language in one of its two most used expressions: speech and writing.
However, when people with some type of communication disability felt that all doors were closing after a diagnosis like Willis's, a group of Argentine developers created an application specially designed for these people to be able to communicate normally despite their limitations.
This app is known as the Ottaa Project and is becoming very popular in the tech world, thanks to its inclusiveness. A tool at the service of people that will improve the quality of life of many by using artificial intelligence to execute an action typical of language. Our case study today will be based on this application. Learn about the Ottaa Project case.
Ottaa Project is the first communication system to use artificial intelligence to help people with speech disabilities find the pictograms they need to send and understand a message. It is a project developed by Argentine researchers that uses information from the environment to feed a unique algorithm that chooses between 1,800 pictograms to create the message that the user needs to communicate with other people.
It arose from the need of two brothers (a communication graduate and a biomedical engineer), creators of the application, for their grandmother with Alzheimer's to be able to communicate with her family again. Just as the grandmother of Héctor and Carlos Costa suffered the loss of speech with her degenerative disease, many people find themselves in the same circumstances whose life stories are not told.
Currently, there are 67 million people with disabilities related to oral language who cannot communicate by this means, due to pathologies such as autism, aphasia, Down syndrome, or cerebral palsy. Until now, these people have communicated using physical books to indicate the idea they want to communicate through pictograms.
With the creation of the Ottaa Project, they will no longer need heavy books to carry out this activity. The project proposes an alternative solution for hospitals that house patients affected by this condition, allowing them to improve interaction with doctors, family members, and friends.
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In 2016, Carlos Costa presented the Ottaa Project application at the TEDxCórdoba event, which took place in the city of Carlos Paz (Córdoba). There, in front of a moved audience, he was able to test the effectiveness of his invention:
“We tested our app that was in an initial stage of development in an educational center for special children in Villa Carlos Paz. We were in a classroom, in the background 20 children were sitting around Mati, a 7-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. We showed him a couple of examples of how to use the application and with it, he was able to create a sentence, and he listened to himself. At that moment, the 20 children who were there turned around to see what had happened, because, for 7 years, Mati sat in his wheelchair, unable to say a single word. At that moment we realized what we had done from an apartment in Nueva Córdoba, following a dream, and seeking to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities”.
After this presentation, the brothers traveled to Qatar where they were selected for the WISH, which refers to the World Summit of Innovation for Health. There, they had the opportunity to show the technology, along with the product to an audience made up of various institutions interested in the project, so they began to carry out pilot tests in the United Arab Emirates.
In 2017, they were selected to participate in Start-Up Chile, one of the most famous startup accelerators in Latin America. After a year of work, many doors were opened for them, which contributed to signing a contract with one of the most important rehabilitation centers in Chile, which is present in more than 14 regions of the country.
Also, they attended the Web Summit in Europe, one of the most prestigious technology conferences in the world, which seeks to connect the technology community with all industries. There, they were finalists among the 100 best exponents, in terms of technological ventures worldwide to be presented in Madrid.
Since the creation of the Ottaa Project application, a hardware technology has been developed at the same time to facilitate the use of the electrical brain activity of people with locked-in syndrome or severe motor disability, also called ALS. The function of this hardware is to create an accessible interface so that those affected by any of these difficulties can perform operational functions that they could not perform by themselves.
"We want to give back the voice to all those who don't have it."
Carlos Costa (Ottaa Project)
It is an application that, through the use of artificial intelligence, allows users to develop phrases with pictograms that are then translated into sounds so that other people can receive and understand the message.
The application can be downloaded through the official website www.ottaaproject.com and has the advantage of recognizing the environment, so the communication parameters are constantly changing depending on the context in which the person is. This means that it is customizable depending on the time and place. In this way, the system analyzes the data from the environment and suggests possible pictograms that it then transforms into sound.
The application helps people affected by a speech disability to be able to communicate soundly based on the choice of various pictograms. Gone are the manual systems that conveyed a childish and primitive feel that further widened the gap between people who could communicate normally and those who couldn't.
Communication has always been a powerful tool of the human being and it would be unfair if people affected by some inability to speak or understand words could not fully develop and live relegated to anonymity or oblivion, constantly depending on other people to have some dignity.
Ottaa Project is a truly inclusive technology that focuses on the needs of thousands of people around the world, to whom it will be able to offer the possibility of acquiring greater communicational autonomy so that by overcoming these limitations of the condition, they can achieve greater confidence in their natural abilities to convey an idea.
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In final words, the Ottaa Project case should serve as an example of inclusion, focused on people who have trouble communicating. This technology, much more efficient than the applications that already existed, makes it possible to shorten the barrier between people, demonstrating that disabilities can be overcome with effort and will, but even more so with the creation of technologies capable of reducing the effects of all these conditioning pathologies.
Once again, it is proven that when you begin working from the knowledge of the needs of customers, in this case, from those who have no voice, you can achieve success and help these people at the same time, as these brothers helped their grandmother with Alzheimer's, their greatest source of inspiration for the Ottaa Project.