Abstract
Functional communication is indispensable for child development at all times but during this COVID-19, non-verbal children become more anxious about social distancing and self-quarantine due to sudden aberration on daily designed practices and professional support. These verbally challenged children require the support of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) for intercommunication. Therefore, during COVID-19, assistance must be provided remotely to these users by a AAC team involving caregivers, teachers, Speech Language Therapist (SLT) to ensure collaborative learning and development of non-verbal child communication skills. However, most of the advanced AAC, such as Speech Generating Devices (SGD), Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) based mobile applications (Android & iOS) are designed considering the scenario of developed countries and less accessible in developing countries. Therefore, in this study, we are focusing on representing feasible short term strategies, prospective challenges and as long term strategy, a cloud based framework entitled as “Bolte Chai+”, which is an intelligent integrated collaborative learning platform for non-verbal children, parents, caregivers, teachers and SLT. The intelligent analytics within the platform monitors child overall progress by tracking child activity in mobile application and conversely support parents and AAC team to concentrate on individual child ubiquitous abilities. We believe, the proposed framework and strategies will empower non-verbal children and assist researchers, policy makers to acknowledge a definitive solution to implement AAC as communication support in developing countries during COVID-19 pandemic.
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Acknowledgment
We are thankful towards “Touri Foundation”-school for gifted children and the ICT Division, Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, for their financial and continuous support in research and development of this project.
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Farzana, W., Sarker, F., Vaidyanathan, R., Chau, T., Mamun, K.A. (2020). Communication Support Utilizing AAC for Verbally Challenged Children in Developing Countries During COVID-19 Pandemic. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S. (eds) HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Posters. HCII 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1294. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60703-6_6
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