[.c-pullout-quote-wrapper][.c-pullout-quote]“Finding a communication solution for people living with cerebral palsy and dysarthria has long been a central focus of families, clinicians and researchers,” [.c-pullout-quote][.c-pullout-quote]Rob White, CEO of Cerebral Palsy Alliance.[.c-pullout-quote][.c-pullout-quote-wrapper]
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[.c-richtext-text-wrapper][.c-richtext-text]While there is big tech on the market designed to help break down these communicative barriers, it’s not uncommon for these solutions to take anywhere between 15 to 20 times longer to convey a message compared to normal speech.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text] Determined to tackle the problem through technological innovation Cerebral Palsy Alliance enlisted Kablamo to help solution how to give children with CP the same rights, access and opportunities as anyone else.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text-wrapper]
[.c-richtext-title-80][.c-richtext-title]My Voice Library is a world-first platform that uses gamification to collect voice and orofacial data from children with cerebral palsy.[.c-richtext-title][.c-richtext-title-80]
[.c-richtext-text-wrapper][.c-richtext-text]More than 50% of people with CP have difficulty speaking and being understood verbally, this condition is known as dysarthria. The lack of quality data on the voices of children with CP is a major barrier in the development of assistive technology solutions to enable communication for this group – that’s where My Voice Library comes in.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text] By gamifying the data collection of dysarthric voice data, My Voice Library aims to make it easier and quicker to assemble a significant, open-source library that biomedical engineers, speech pathologists and researchers can use to develop the next generation of assistive technology.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text]Kablamo’s solution design was celebrated for its user-friendly and engaging experience. It was designed to be accessible and enjoyable for children, enabling them to explore themed worlds, level up, and actively participate in expanding the voice library.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text-wrapper]
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[.c-richtext-quote-wrapper][.c-richtext-quote]“My Voice Library is unique – it’s the first time we’ve been able to collect voice samples of children who have a dysarthric speech condition. The gamified modules make it easier for children to go through the tasks – in order for engineers and researchers to develop and test new technology, they need a lot of repetitions of sounds and words, and My Voice Library will enable this,” said Dr Petra Karlsson, CPA Research Institute’s technology and My Voice Library program lead[.c-richtext-quote][.c-richtext-quote-wrapper]
[.c-richtext-title-60][.c-richtext-title]Real time data fuels real time innovation[.c-richtext-title][.c-richtext-title-60]
[.c-richtext-text-wrapper][.c-richtext-text]Through the use of AWS services, ongoing hosting costs are extremely low. Utilising a completely serverless approach, Kablamo implemented a continuous delivery pipeline deploying a static website hosted with S3 + CloudFront, with a lightweight and simple-to-deploy Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB backend. The frontend connected directly to S3 to download configuration and upload user data, and S3 lifecycle policies were used to age the data to low-cost Glacier Archive storage until it was needed.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text] Restrictive S3 bucket policies were employed to ensure that once key user data was uploaded, it could no longer be downloaded by the application. User access, available to the account through IAM Identity Center, is logged in CloudTrail - including a data events trail on key S3 buckets to ensure that all access to user data is auditable.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text]Other AWS services utilised included AWS Organizations, Budgets, IAM, KMS, CloudFormation, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, EventBridge, SNS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch and CloudWatch Logs, and Athena.[.c-richtext-text][.c-richtext-text-wrapper]
[.c-richtext-quote-wrapper][.c-richtext-quote]“My cerebral palsy is who I am and I am very proud of it. I really can’t imagine life without cerebral palsy. But my biggest disability is my speech, and not being able to have instant communication without planning the best way to get my message across. In future, our My Voice Library research will make communication easier for people with cerebral palsy, and I’m proud to be involved,” said participant Maria.[.c-richtext-quote][.c-richtext-quote-wrapper]
