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Our story starts off with my younger brother, Marvin. Marvin is nonverbal and on the Autism spectrum. Throughout life, I watched him try many different AAC apps and devices to communicate, and saw how they fell short. They were often too hard, and required way too much training to use, and when he would use them, they would only allow for the most basic communication of needs.
Throughout his life, I would often wonder what he was thinking. He was never able to find the ability to properly speak to us besides telling us yes or no, when he wanted food, when he wanted water, or to go to the bathroom. I didn't even know something as simple as his favorite movie!
In 2018, when Marvin was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a type of cancer, 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. And now, how would he advocate for himself, or tell the doctors how he's truly feeling, during the grueling rounds of chemo and weeks of hospital stay?
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 They're also very unintuitive, often needing months of dedicated time to learn well, and are outdated in technology.
Fast forward 6 years later, I'm a software engineer working on using AI to learn about space and our very own earth, 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.
So, here we are.
I'm happy to say that Marvin is doing well these days, and that he is enjoying using Mosaic Voice. I even know what his favorite movie is :)
