For parents, loved ones, and family that struggle with the frustration of users with impediments to speech and language formulation…
Connection
Primary Caregivers are family, loved ones, and purchasers of the app. They are the caregivers involved in all aspects of the user’s life. They help make daily decisions, share in daily successes, and must help work through the daily setbacks that affect the user’s feelings of self-worth. They frequently feel “left out of the Alliance” when making decisions on behalf of the user.
AAC Options
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (see “about AAC”) tools provide some help in that direction. The NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) provides an overview of many assistive devices available.
On the “easy” side of the spectrum are simplistic icon-driven applications with little innovation in the past 25 years. On the “hard” side are Speech-Generating Devices with a steep learning curve. These are typically clunky, obtrusive, and can be quite expensive.
OiGO© Strengthens the Alliance by bringing
Primary Caregivers into the Decision Process
A Practical Solution
OiGO© App empowers users to formulate unique, complete sentences that express specific, complex thoughts. Relying on progressive, customizable phrase-building and an easy-to-master user interface, OiGO© acts as a fast, collaborative conversation-starter and a behavior tracker when your loved needs it most.
Who can use it? OiGO© App is effective for users from adolescence to adulthood suffering from neurologically-based impediments to speech and language formulation. Users are intellectually aware, rational, and expressive—an adolescent stutterer, a retired factory worker struggling with Alzheimer’s, or a veteran with severe brain trauma, a teen with Autism.
OiGO© App users are aware of feelings and concerns, but they are unable to express them. OiGO© App strips away the stress of formulating a phrase or a sentence. The user is guided to a coherent sentence that expresses emotion in a mature, grammatically correct manner.
What can it “say”? This question arises because of the limitations of most AAC products. These products feature an array of icons that relate to specific concepts, and users must use a deductive process to select a concept that most closely matches their need (usually limited to words and phrases anticipated by the app designers).
No limits. OiGO© App is not limited to icons or pre-formatted statements. The app allows users, families, and professionals to collaborate to create client-specific reasons for feelings. The app guides users to specific, situational statements and requests using a uniquely inductive process.
Once an emotion has been identified, the user can explore unique behavior solutions to their setbacks through a collaborative, wiki-style Behavior Cloud.
OiGO© App can be used as an educational as well as a communicative tool.
The end result is a grammatically correct compound sentence that expresses not only an emotion, but a recipient of that emotion, as well as the underlying reason behind that emotion. Bridges App© not only express practical needs, but also deeper psychological emotions.
Next Steps
ACT is interested in how you might use OiGO© App. Please contact us with your questions.