Hello,
For people that have difficulty communicating, this topic may be of interest.
Background
Unfortunately my mother got a lot of issues communicating because of her Parkinson’s disease. Her motor is affected such that she can hardly control her arms and fingers. On top of that the neurological disorder affects her speaking abilities as well so she is very hard to hear and understand. Through this combination she is living more or less in isolation.
We couldn’t find any suitable communication tools (except expensive picture based tooling). Because of this I developed an text-based iPad/iPhone application with which she can still create, write and send small messages /words given her minimal capabilities.
As this app is very useful to helping my mother, I imagine it could also be very useful to help others too. Thats why I uploaded the ‘app’ in the (Apple) appstore and it can be downloaded and used for free. The app is called ‘ISay’ and can be found easiest using the same name in the appstore.
ISay
‘ISay’ comes with a special designed keyboard to be used by people with limited motor control (e.g. trembling / slow moving). Where a regular keyboard produces multiple letters in case of trembling, or no letter in case of too slow removal, this application will execute a button once (or produce just 1 letter).
The application has been kept very simple and self explanatory. It uses a 9-button A-Z, 0-9 keyboard (instead of regular QWERTY). Besides this keyboard also a 3-button keyboard is made available for those people have even more serious motor impact. Every message is automatically archived and can be easily retrieved for later (re-)use. The archive can be easily cleaned to remove obsolete messages.
All messages, also from archive, can be sent using via ISay (per SMS/iMessage).
As it is an app, it is easy to carry this aid with you, simply by bringing your iPad or iPhone.
I hope this application can help you make life a little bit better, just like it still helps my mother!
Kind regards,
Ernst