Supporting Personal Narrative for Children with Complex Communication Needs

Children with complex communication needs who use voice output communication aids seldom engage in extended conversation. The “How was School today...?” system has been designed to enable such children to talk about their school day. The system uses data-to-text technology to generate narratives from sensor data. Observations, interviews and prototyping were used to ensure that stakeholders were involved in the design of the system. Evaluations with three children showed that the prototype system, which automatically generates utterances, has the potential to support disabled individuals to participate better in interactive conversation. Analysis of a conversational transcript and observations indicate that the children were able to access relevant conversation and had more control in the conversation in comparison to their usual interactions where control lay mainly with the speaking partner. Further research to develop an improved, more rugged system that supports users with different levels of language ability is now underway.