Towards a More Inclusive World: Enhanced Augmentative and Alternative Communication For People With Disabilities UsingAI and NLP

Winsor, Cole C.; Robbertz, Andrew Leonard; Valente, Richard Correia; Emil, Zachary Girgis

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Towards a More Inclusive World: Enhanced Augmentative and Alternative Communication For People With Disabilities UsingAI and NLP

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For people with verbal or cognitive impairments, engaging in conversation can be tiresome and time-consuming, limiting their educational, social, and career opportunities. Livox is a pictogram-based alternative communication application that empowers people with a wide range of visual and motor impairments to engage in conversations. This project incorporated a ML and NLP-based classifier to detect specific questions and present the most relevant pictograms to users. Our newly introduced classifier reduced the time and effort required to communicate by 68.5% and 56.4%, respectively compared to the standard application. These results show that our work is a step towards making the world a more inclusive place for those who are nonverbal and have motor skill challenges.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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