A multimodal communication aid for global aphasia patients

This paper presents the basic rationale behind the development and testing of a multimodal communication aid especially designed for people suffering from global aphasia, and thus having severe expressive difficulties. The principle of the aid is to trigger patient associations by presenting various multimodal representations of communicative expressions. The aid can in this way be seen as a conceptual continuation of previous research within the field of communication aids based on uni-modal (pictorial) representations of communicative expressions. As patients suffering from global aphasia seldom have identical symptoms, the focus of this paper is placed on the development of a highly dedicated communication aid adaptive to the individual patients’ needs. The paper investigates whether or not such a highly dedicated communication aid based on multimodal representations of communicative expressions can be used to support patients with global aphasia in communicating by means of short sentences with their surroundings. Only a limited evaluation is carried out, and as such no statistically significant results are obtained. The tests however indicate that the aid is capable of supporting a global aphasia patient in participating in conversations based on short sentences which otherwise would be impossible without the use of a communication aid.