My enthusiasm for improving the quality of life of my brother, who suffers from cerebral palsy, has driven this project. For the last three years I have been working on Integrar-T, an application that consists of an alternative and augmentative communication system (AAC) for people with disabilities that prevent them from communicating through speech. It is paradoxical that in a fundamentally virtual and hyperconnected world there are no functional and totally accessible systems that meet the needs of these special users.
The project kicked off with a preliminary analysis of several communication systems. During this stage I understood that most of them were non-digital versions; that is, communication systems made by professionals on a physical format. When the first digital Alternative Systems (AAC) were designed I threw myself into investigating them to find the best tool for my brother. That's when I realised that there was no solution that fully met his needs.
According to the national data base of people with disabilities, in Spain there are almost four million disabled people, of whom about 800,000 have limited speech capacity. In this project, I also took into account what teaching methods are usually carried out with people with disabilities. This insight helped me provide greater functionalities to the system.
How does Integrar-T work?
The main screen of the application consists of tabs which represent categories such as family, work, food, etc. Each one is made up of pictograms that represent the action we want to communicate. To make it more attractive for the user, each category is represented by a color so that users can associate more easily the category with the pictograms or actions to be communicated. The phrase is constructed by navigating between the different categories and by clicking on the pictograms that we want to use.