How was School Today...? in the Wild

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can provide access to computerised speech output for children who have little or no speech due to disabilities, such as cerebral palsy. Computer based speech generating AAC devices which provide access to prestored words, phrases and sentences are well suited to communicate needs and wants (such as I am thirsty). However, they do not well support more complex interactions such as conversational narrative (guess what happened to me today) and social dialogue (e.g., pub chats about football). Not only are these interactions essential for building vocabulary and general language acquisition; they form an essential part of the process of making and sustaining friendships and other social relationships. Indeed, social isolation is a major quality-of-life issue amongst people with communication impairment.Our goal is to develop AAC tools that support story-telling and social dialogue. We will be building on our work in a feasibility study in which we constructed a proof-of-concept system for helping children with communication disabilities to construct and tell stories about their day at school. We used sensors to track the children's location, activities, and interactions. This data was used to generate a draft story using a natural language generation data-to-text system. We also built tools which allowed the children to edit and interactively narrate the stories. Evaluation with two disabled children showed that the system allowed them to experience more natural conversation. This project will address several issues raised in the feasibility study: the system needs to be able to support children with very diverse capabilities and impairments; it needs to be tailored to fit into the school environment and curriculum; and it needs to be attractive to teachers as well as students. It also needs to be able to run in the wild without the need for the constant technical support from the research team.This proposal seeks to investigate these issues in order to create an improved prototype system which we will trial for five months, not just one week as in the feasibility project. By its nature this work must be carried out in close collaboration with the children and their school; we need to embed ourselves in the environment in order to fully investigate the reality of implementing and using such a system. We will work with staff, parents and children to understand their perspectives, the impact of diversity in the children, and the practicalities of technical support in a school environment.

Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), their parents, teachers, therapists, AAC companies, and the general public will all benefit from the proposed research. Children who use AAC are the main beneficiaries of our work; it will enhance their communication and interaction, thereby leading to a higher quality of life. We will engage and communicate with these children by working in the wild at two special schools. We will engage with parents, teachers, and therapists at the schools, and by emailing updates to people who have contacted us. In addition, we will run workshops through Communication Matters at the end of our project to present our results to those interested in AAC. AAC is not generally understood by the public. Publicity features in newspapers, radio and television will be used to raise the public awareness of the abilities and needs of people who use AAC. We have been quite successful in obtaining media publicity for our previous projects. We will continue to interest the media in our research. We also plan to submit a proposal to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition about our work as will be an excellent venue for communicating our work to the public as it allows more depth than media reports. We are very keen to get our technology out into the real world as we want our ideas to be used to help language-impaired children communicate better. We believe the most promising commercialisation path is to make our system into a module which can be incorporated into existing commercial AAC systems. A leading AAC company is a partner in the project and other AAC companies have also expressed interest in our work; we will keep them abreast of our published research. Our software will be copyrighted and we will sign non-disclosure agreements any company with whom we have confidential discussions. Our strategy will be to sell our IPR to an AAC developer who will then create a commercial version of our software. If the company needs assistance with the specialist Natural Language Generation software, this can be provided via a consultancy arrangement with a spin-out company currently being established by Aberdeen University. It is also intended to review the potential for the research to be used for other population groups, e.g., those with autism and aphasia. If this was proven to be at least feasible, it would allow the research to develop in complimentary areas and access other market sectors for multiple commercial licences for a variety of industrial companies. We are also very keen to explore whether our ideas can help adults with communication impairments. Dr Waller, the Dundee PI, will overall be in charge of engagement activities, although all project members will assist with this; she has extensive experience interacting with children with complex communication needs and their parents, teachers, and therapists. Ehud Reiter (the Aberdeen PI) and Rolf Black (the Dundee RF) will take the lead in commercial exploitation; Dr Reiter is currently setting up a spin-out company in Aberdeen based on previous EPSRC-funded research. Mr Black has experience in establishing new products in the Assistive Technology market. Aberdeen and Dundee Universities have public relations staff who will assist with media-related activities (as they have in previous activities), and technology-transfer staff who will assist with commercialisation. SICSA (Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance), which Aberdeen and Dundee belong to, has a knowledge transfer team who can advise on IT-specific commercialisation issues.