Author(s): Jessica Hunter, Hiu Yan Lam, Alexis Abney
Mentor(s): Dallin Bailey
Institution BYU
Nonfluent aphasia is a disorder that occurs due to damage to the brain. Individuals with this disorder have typical or near-typical language comprehension skills and disordered language production skills, leaving them with difficulties sufficiently expressing themselves. As a result, their daily communication and social activities can be affected negatively, leading to feelings of frustration and loneliness. This project aims to assist individuals with nonfluent aphasia to effectively communicate with others through sharing their needs, memories, opinions, and so forth. Our research group has been developing and testing an artificial intelligence (AI) enhanced augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app, with the purpose of expanding a handful of main content words into full sentences. This AI AAC app integrates these content words spoken by the individual with nonfluent aphasia with a short biographical summary about them to generate elaborated messages from their original utterances that are specific to their lives. Overall, these sentences may convey the individual's message more completely, while requiring less effort from them to generate the sentences. In order to prepare for testing the app with people with aphasia, the current project has consisted of testing and troubleshooting the app software, ensuring that its features are user friendly and navigable with simple training. Through repeated testing and trials of the system, researchers have been identifying the best ways to utilize AI in the creation of predicted sentences from the original utterances. This testing has improved the potential of the tool to help people with aphasia to express multiple types of utterances on a number of topics. Ultimately, the app’s testing has prepared it for testing by individuals with nonfluent aphasia, whose feedback on how to improve the app will continue to guide its development.