The journey
From frustration to purpose
In 2018, when Marvin was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkins lymphoma, I blamed myself. How could there have been a tumor right there, pressing against his lungs, obviously causing him distress, without me realizing? I wonder how early we would have caught it had he been able to properly communicate to us the pain he must have been in.
"How would he advocate for himself, or tell the doctors how he's truly feeling?"
So, during the many weeks on end spent overnight with him at the hospital, I began looking. There must be an AAC app or device somewhere, that would be easy for him to quickly pick up, with minimal speech language pathologist intervention, and that would, most importantly, be able to give him a voice so he could advocate for himself.
Unfortunately, I came up short. Current AAC apps greatly restrict the amount of symbols available to the user, because they purposefully allow only the most basic phrasing. They're also very unintuitive, often needing months of dedicated time to learn well, and are outdated in technology.
Years later, I'm a software engineer working on AI and scientific tools, when one day I'm thinking back on this and decide to search and see if there's a solution. I was surprised to see there still wasn't.
