AACstive Touchpad: An Electronic Augmentative and Alternative Communication Touchpad for Post-Stroke Aphasic Patients Basic Support

Abstract

Stroke is one of the primary causes of aphasia in the world. This deficit doesn't include their ability to think but, their lack of way to communicate degrades an aphasic patient's personhood. Speech-language therapy is the known treatment for aphasia. The different levels of severity and personal acceptance of patients greatly contribute to the complexity of treatment application. These factors challenge the general approach of speech and language therapy for aphasia rehabilitation. One factor that greatly solve this challenge is social engagement, but this approach becomes limited to lower severe cases where they have better capability to exercise their communication skills even outside treatment. The use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication devices was established to promote significant improvements of linguistic skills in aphasic patients, but AAC devices are not accessible to most patients and aphasia clinicians and researchers are not experts in the field of its working technology. This study developed an augmentative and alternative communication (ACC) device with materials that are market-available and with open-source software for device manipulation. These contributes to removing the barrier of limited help of technology for treating aphasia. The ACCstive Touchpad were made with the basic necessary features that an ACC device must have such as personalized bank of word and phrases that they could use outside of therapy. With the string and speech tests made with aphasic patients, the devices were concluded to be user-friendly. While with the character test, aphasic patients could decide if they would desire a keyboard with more buttons.