Provision of an easy-to-use, accurate & low cost communications aid for patients with tracheostomies

"There are a group of people who are unable to vocalise or move their limbs but are able to move their lips. In a hospital setting these include those with neck and spinal cord injuries, degenerative neurological conditions and some head and neck cancers. There are only a few ways of allowing these patients to communicate and those resources are expensive (lip readers or 'eye gaze' devices) and need extensive training to use.

Liopa are proposing the **SRAVI** application (**S**peech **R**ecognition **A**pp for the **V**oice **I**mpaired) which will be based on **LipRead**, Liopa's Visual Speech Recognition platform. This novel application of a proven technology allows translation of lip movement to text using an android app on a mobile device which will need very little training and is inexpensive. It uses artificial intelligence to learn how an individual's lips move and stores this function in the cloud. This allows various devices to access the system unlike ""eye gaze"" systems which are restricted to one device per affected individual. This also allows communication between patients, staff and family from an early stage. This empowers the patient to take a more proactive role in their care and recovery improving wellbeing and potentially reducing the length of recovery in certain cases.

This feasibility study will look at a select group of patients with tracheostomies (approximately 10 000 tracheostomies are placed per year in the UK) who currently struggle to vocalise but can move their lips to establish whether the software is accurate and if it is usable in the clinical setting of a critical care area of an NHS hospital.

Starting from a limited vocabulary in English, our software has the potential to be expanded to become much larger and apt to use in other languages and markets."