Aphasia Project: Overview
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The Aphasia Project is a multi-disciplinary research project, a collaboration between the University of British Columbia and Princeton University, investigating how technology can be designed to support individuals with aphasia in their daily life. Aphasia is an acquired cognitive disorder that affects a person's ability to speak, read, and write as well as understand spoken words. We work in conjunction with people who have aphasia; they share their expertise of living/communicating with aphasia with us to help us explore communication and high-level applications that combine images, text, and sound. Many of our applications are developed for state of the art mobile technologies, such as personal digital assistants and tablet PCs.
The likelihood of acquiring aphasia increases with age (see below). Early in our research with people with aphasia we discovered that the mobile technologies we are using have basic usability problems that we suspect may be experienced by the wider population of older adults, rather than specifically just by people with aphasia. Thus, our project has expanded to include healthy older adults and we are investigating how the basic usability of mobile technologies is affected by a user's age.
Further, in collaboration with Harvey Mudd College we have recently begun work with the the Brainfingers device and children with cerebral palsy.
We are currently working on an aphasia-friendly version of this website.
What is Aphasia?
Aphasia is an acquired disorder affecting an individual's language abilities. The majority of people with aphasia acquired it as a result of stroke, but it can also result from other brain injuries such as brain tumors. Aphasia affects speaking ability, writing ability, reading ability, and/or the ability to understand spoken language. It impairs these skills to varying degree and in any combination. For some people, their communication ability changes day-by-day; writing a note today can become incomprehensible to read tomorrow. In addition, using language becomes increasingly difficult as an aphasic individual grows weary or tense.
Since communicating through spoken word can be difficult or impossible, individuals with aphasia will tend to use expressive gestures and visual cues in conversations. This limited method of communication can be frustrating, and aphasic individuals will often lose control of conversational topics as they have less opportunity to introduce new issues and have slower communication responses than non-aphasic people. To strangers, aphasic symptoms can appear as impaired intelligence, but what they are observing is that people with aphasia have trouble expressing ideas through spoken and written language.
History
Well-known activist for women-in-computing, Dr. Anita Borg, was diagnosed with brain cancer in the spring of 2000. As a result of her brain tumor, Anita acquired aphasia. The disability reduced her vocabulary in spoken and written word, but she still communicated well. The Aphasia Group formed in the winter of 2002, in part, to help Anita with managing daily tasks on an easily portable device. Unfortunately, Anita passed away in April of 2003. In the wake of her death, the Aphasia Project has grown to include faculty and students from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada) and Princeton University (Princeton, NJ, USA) in partnership with aphasic participants from many local centers for rehabilitation and therapy.
Participation
Our project has drawn participants from the BC Aphasia Center, the Adler Aphasia Center, GF Strong Rehabilitation Center, and local stroke clubs.
We are running ongoing assessments and are working with people who have aphasia. We also are looking for students and researchers who are interested in this project. If you are interested in participating in our project, please send an e-mail aphasia-web@cs.ubc.ca.
This project has received support from NSERC, Lingraphicare, CIHR, Princeton University, UBC, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, the NSF, and HP.