Inspiration
One of our team members is a part of a club at Cupertino High School called Best Buddies whose goal is to bridge the gap between mentally disabled individuals and the rest of the students at the school. We do this through a variety of games and activities though some of our members struggle to communicate verbally. This is where an AAC board comes in. AAC boards are not novel but they are not all easily available for people and they are also physical making it not as easily portable and less convenient. By digitizing the boards it can be more convenient and accessible.
What it does
AAC boards allow its users to click buttons labeled with images to formulate sentences that they would otherwise have trouble formulating themselves. This helps them communicate by making sentences using the AAC board. When a student clicks a button, the board will give new buttons that stem off that first word, it essentially prompting the user for the next word. Students can choose from different categories of words and be as specific as necessary to mention the things that they need. Not only that the AAC board will recognize past search inputs and recommend the user in the future for prominent searches, this makes it easier for the user to navigate the board.
How we built it
We built it using soley swift on XCode.
Challenges we ran into
Getting the frontend layout of all the icons to be cohesive and be able to transition between the different pages effectively. There is lots of data to compile and categorize so also making it streamlined and simple to understand was a challenge and ton of work. However through different delegations we were able to figure out these problems gradually.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our overall functionality that being button interactions; the buttons transition to other subset buttons and actually respond to input. Our AAC board was genuinely able to help form a sentence that was easy to understand. Most of all we were able to join the frontend and backend and maintain the integrity of each of the respective parts. This made our board closer to an actual product ready to be released than one on the drawing board.
What we learned
We learned a lot more about Swift as all of us had background experience but we did not have the entire skill set required to create our board.
What's next for AAC Mobile Board
Integration with Dictation, more categories/subsets, more AI capabilities like search menus. Some of these AI capabilities we felt were more of an afterthought and was not as important as the main AAC board, as such we did not prioritize it and instead prioritize the functionality of the actual board.
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