Voice for the voiceless

CHENNAI: Innovation sprouts only when a strongly-felt need arises. Ajit Narayanan sensed such a need two years prior, when he visited Vidya Sagar, an organisation that works with children and young adults with neurological disabilities and speech disorders. As  a result of his device, Avaz, hundreds of such children are now able communicate with ease.

“Avaz is a handy hardware device for people with speech disorders such as cerebral palsy, autism and aphasia that translates their muscle movements into speech,” says this 29-year-old city based innovator.

Lacking controlled movements makes communication hard for people with neurological disabilities and Avaz works on the principle of scanning their movements. It displaysvarious options on a screen and presents a highlight that moves between the different options. When a full sentence has been constructed, Avaz converts the message into speech.  

Ajit won the national award for ‘Empowerment of People with Disabilities’, last year. Also, this youngster has been recently selected as the ‘Innovator of the year’ by Technology Review, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s publication. “It was a honour to speak about my product before eminent scientists, Technology Review EmTech conference and all of them appreciated the social impact teh device,” says Ajit.

While there are many such alternative communication devices available in the market, factors such as cost-effectiveness and the possibility of using Indian languages to communicate make Ajit’s product stand out from the rest. “We constantly worked on the device and tested it with Vidya Sagar students. It went through changes both internally and externally. In the prototype, there was no touch screen and now it has one,” explains Ajit. Though one can communicate through Indian languages using his device, he wants to make it more sophisticated by synthesising the voices. And has been pursuing this, in a tie up with IISC, Bangalore.

A post graduate in Electricals from IIT-Madras, Ajit orked as an engineer in the US for four-and-half years before returning home to start his own company, Invention Labs. “In developed countries, this industry is very big, with a variety of devices. But here it’s still unexplored though there is a lot of scope,” Ajit points out. One of the advantages of Avaz is that it costs less than one-tenth of other such communication devices in the  Indian market.

Invention Labs has sold more than 50 devices to different NGOs all over the country and Ajit has been visiting every NGO to get feed back. “The device is already bringing out the creativity and intelligence of those special people, though there is still a long way to go,” confides Ajit.

(Avaz costs `30,000 and for more information, visit www.inventionlabs.in.)