Innovation: PictoVerb

Hungary

AAI Domains:

• Capacity and enabling environment (use of ICT)

• Participation in society (social connectedness)

• Independent, healthy and secure living (lifelong learning)

Verbal communication makes every day life easier but it is taken for granted until people are faced with the prospect or lose their ability to talk to others. Speech impairments can affect people of all ages, for example people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome, and are a common limitation on life after a person has had a stroke. The experience of having difficulties in communicating can be deeply frustrating and challenging for the person affected and for their family and carers. There is scope for social innovations that use technology to overcome barriers to communication and thus improve the quality of life for people of all ages faced with limitations of this kind.

PictoVerb is a smart phone and tablet application that was developed by Hungarian high school student Balazs Zsombori in 2012 after he met a woman who had lost her voice due to illness and faced the prospect of having to learn new ways of communicating. Zsombori used his ICT skills to develop an intuitive application that used widely recognised symbols to be transformed into grammatically correct audio sentences.

The demonstration version was sufficiently impressive for Zsombori to win the Hungarian Innovation Contest for Youth in 2012 and with this prize came mentoring and support to develop the PictoVerb prototype into a more refined application. Zsombori worked with further potential users, their families and staff in care institutions to further develop the pilot version and in 2013 his work was recognised with a highly creditable third prize in the European Union’s Contest for Young Scientists.

A beta version for Hungarian speakers was launched in 2014 and now has well over a thousand users and this was followed in early 2015 with a Maltese and English language version. PictoVerb is controlled by touch or by simple head movements and is generally considered to be user friendly. Further versions for iOS and Windows operating systems are in development as are applications that will provide audio communication in other European languages.

The potential of PictoVerb has also been acknowledged by UNICEF in their The State of the World’s Children Report 2015 that recognised that it offered children with language difficulties the opportunity to communicate more easily.

In relation to active ageing and social innovation, PictoVerb has the potential to improve the social connectedness of people of all ages who experience verbal communication difficulties. This could be particularly valuable to older people who experience speech limitations after a stroke and for children and adults with disabilities. It is based on the application of ICT for social purposes and has been developed with the involvement of potential users to ensure that it is as user friendly as possible.

PictoVerb website