Aphasia is an acquired language disorder caused by traumatic brain injury or disease. It’s common consequence of stroke that damages specific brain regions responsible for language generation and comprehension. Aphasia affects approximately over 30% of stroke survivors. Aphasics can have different communication disabilities depending which area and extent of brain is damaged and these impairments may vary in intensity and severity. Language modalities including talking, reading, writing, remembering words and understanding spoken or written languages can be affected in various combinations. Precise classifying types and subtypes of aphasia is difficult because language is a comprehensive and complex behavior. Therefore every aphasics is unique and has highly selective range of disabilities. The most common kinds of aphasia are: expressive aphasia (loss the ability to produce spoken or written language also called Broca’s aphasia), receptive aphasia (inability to understand language in its written or oral form also called Wernicke's aphasia) and global aphasia (combination of both comprehension and expression of language). Other impairments concern problems with recalling words or naming objects (anomic aphasia), poor speech repetition (conduction aphasia) and many more.
Please watch this sad document to better understand main problems concerning people with aphasia:
When someone loses the ability to use language due to injury, for instance because of aphasia, he or she also loses the ability to communicate and share stories, which can eventually lead to social isolation. Individuals with aphasia like to be listened to and understood like other healthy individuals. They want to express their ideas, comments, anecdotes and feelings about what occurred to them in their daily life. Storytelling supports also communication goals such as maintaining or establishing social connections, besides the transfer of information. Aphasics require easy access and simplicity in their communication aids and need the ability to communicate at a distance instantaneously.
There are many Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) solutions providing hardware and software tools for supplementing or replacing speech or writing in the production or comprehension of spoken or written language.
Thanks to mobile devices like smartphones/tablets and social networks the aphasics have a great opportunity to communicate and share their everyday experience via multimodal interfaces. Many applications are available starting from very basic like picture dictionaries (for example ICOON digital or Oxford Picture Dictionary) with icons/images representing objects, activities etc.:
to very advanced like DynaVox Compass offering comprehensive set of tools supporting everyday conversations:
These tools can help to communicate using the precise words for complete communication and self-expression.
Some questions for discussion:
1. Have you ever heard about aphasia or met a person with this disability?
2. What is the biggest problem for people with aphasia in your opinion and how it could be reduced?
3. Do you know any applications that might be useful to such people?
4. Quality of life of such persons is very important for better rehabilitation results. What is the level of awerness of this issue in Polish society?
Many people are trying really hard to figure out how to effectively target audience of customers called "Millennial Generation". This is important because this people (born between 1981 and 2000) are big and powerful part of the market. We can more or less figure out how this group behaves. 93% of them are avid Internet users (compared to 88% of adults ages 35-54 and 42% of adults ages 55 and older), they used to be very comfortable with new technology and social media and so one but for me much more interesting is next "Post Millennium" generation so kids born after Y2K. Representatives of this generation are lead and educated by Millennials so parents or teachers of these kids are familiar with social networks and can find every useful knowledge in internet. This allows teaching really young people amazing thinks potentially not available for their parents in that age.
Like in those videos:
14-Year-Old Prodigy Programmer Dreams In Code
Teen Speaks Over 20 Languages
Or just tech them in extraordinary way.
What do you think about post millennium generation?
Do you think that kids of post millennium generation will be better educated / prepared for adult live then millennium generation?
Do you think that kids of post millennium generation will easily solve problems inherited from our generation like: problems of minorities, religious radicals, political correctness, unemployment and so on?
Very often,manypeople complainthat they don't havetime for anything especially for learning new things. A lot of them reallywanttolearn something newbut they don't have timefor that. Thats why this weekI would liketo presentinterestingvideoaboutthat in order tomaster thenew abilities we don'tneedto spenda lot of time we need only about 20 hours for that.
Pleasewatch this movie andanswer thequestions.
1.What do you thinkabout theauthor'sassertionthatnewskillscan be learned in20 days ? 2.How muchtime do you need to masterthe skillsand what makesyouthe biggest problem when you are learningsomething new ? 3.What is your wayto mastera new skills ?
