Empowering Children with Learning Difficulties

A case study from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) archives looking at new technology which is helping children with disabilities take control of their conversations and share experiences with their family. The software system gathers information about a child’s experiences at school and converts the data into a story that a child can share at home. This enables children with disabilities to have conversations in a faster, more interactive way. A sensor and swipe card system collects the data and a technology called Natural Language Generation (NLG) is used to convert it into simple sentences. For example, if the data places the child in the hall at 1.30pm, the system would generate a sentence such as “After lunch I went to the hall”. If somebody called Anne swiped her card on the system it would produce “Anne was there”. If the child adds a positive comment by pressing a smiley face, the system would automatically generate “She is nice”. NGL was developed by researchers at the University of Dundee with EPSRC support. EPSRC is a part of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) partnership of research councils.