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A 16-Year-Old Builds a Device To Convert Breath Into Speech
stephendavion writes A 16-year-old from India has designed a device that converts breath into speech. High-school student Arsh Shah Dilbagi invented TALK as a portable and affordable way to aid people suffering from ALS, locked-in syndrome, and anyone else speech-impaired or paralyzed. Prototyped using a basic $25 Arduino microcontroller, Dilbagi's invention costs only $80, or about a hundred times less than the sort of Augmentative and Alternative Communication device used by Stephen Hawking. TALK works by translating breath into electric signals using a MEMS Microphone, an advanced form of listening tech that uses a diaphragm etched directly onto a silicon microchip. The user is expected to be able to give two distinguishable exhales, varying in intensity or time, so that they can spell words out using Morse code.
How many words can the average person "breathe" before they pass out?
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
I say that as if I know it has already happen but I am fairly sure that the guy will never see any return from his invention.
I congratulate this kid for thinking outside the box. I wonder where he will go from here with his invention?
I have a friend who was recently diagnosed with ALS, and the disease is progressing agressively with him. I hope there is something affordable like this when and if he gets to the point he needs it.
Proverbs 21:19
about a hundred times less than
Don't ever use this phraseology. It's meaningless.
N times more than == N+1 times as much as, but "N times less than" isn't anything.
It might seem intuitively true that "2 times less than" would be "half as much as", but then what is "1 time less than"?
This is stupid.
Is it just me or does it seem like this could have been done a half century ago?
Non-MEMS Microphone -> Op Amp -> PID controller -> Buzzer
I actually don't understand what benefit is gleaned from using a MEMS microphone instead of an ordinary condenser one.
Size and price?
..because a lot of design work has gone into them, and they have more stuff that makes them more usable.
Off the top of my head, I think this device would be slow to use, and would require a fair amount of skill/education (you have to be able to spell words in morse code - fine for many, but a problem if you've got broad developmental issues). Physically, for many users, taking 15 breaths to spell a word is going to be slow and (for some) very tiring. As you get tired and aren't in perfect control of your breathing, even small errors in input would cascade down and the resulting words would be unintelligible. Because Morse code isn't actually well suited to the task.
Again, off the top of my head, it seems like it'd be much faster to choose common words (or pictures) off a screen (a screen wouldn't add much to the cost - probably only a few dollars). Then you could use continuous breaths - perhaps with the device measuring breath velocity when the user is able to moderate that - to alternatively move a cursor x+y (and then a short breath to "click") to choose options off a grid. With some training, I bet you could get most common words in 3 breaths this way. Or, when more choices are required, you could use the same mechanism to press keys on a keyboard (though, again, you'd definitely want word completion). For heavy users without developmental issues and with good breath control, you could build out a shorthand type system that might be fast enough for reasonably paced conversation (using breath length/intensity, and lengths of pauses between).
I'm not saying this isn't a cool thing, and it could certainly be made cheaply (though, again, a very cheap screen would make this a lot easier to use). But it's pretty much the "hello world" of assistive devices. I like when people make new things, and I like effort/attention going to problems like this, but I'm tired of how these articles tend to belittle the work done by others who've approached the same problem. It's not that nobody ever thought of making a simple breath control system before. Most likely everyone who approached the problem started by making a device much like this to test the initial breath control... and then they made fancier ones that worked better, based on the feedback they got from real users. Pretty much any suitable engineer, when presented with this problem and a cost constraint, would be able to make a similar or more usable device.
That's no disrespect to him (he's doing a good thing) - it's disrespect to this kind of breathless reporting. No, some teenager in Britain didn't come up with a way to triple the speed of your internet connection. No, some science fair kid didn't come up with a way to make solar panels 100% more efficient. People seem to love the base story here (teenager shows us all the way), but the stories almost always well overstate their case.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
When you made it, you weren't legally a person. Non-persons can't own a patent.
Perhaps the ability to pick up the sound without outside interference too? Or the fact that the MEMS creates more or less a digital signal by default?
Actually, it likely isn't doing anything with sound in the traditional sense. The MEMS microphone is pressure sensitive so it is likely not listening for breathing but measuring pressure differentials when breathing occurs. This could aid speed because you could close your lips and move your tongue or mouth or even flex your throat to force air through your nose to do the Morse code quicker then short bursts of breathing. In this case, air pressure would be different with air moving verses not moving even if just by minute amounts. Although the article says distinguishable breaths so I may be wrong on it.
Grrr.
... but one hundredth the cost.
Sure if thing A is inexpensive, then thing B which costs a fraction of that price might indeed be said to cost X times less. Implying that thing A is already less than some other option, and thing B is even MORE less.
But if thing A is very expensive (as in the example cited in TFA), thing B would be better described as being not a hundred times less
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As a regular at the Moosque I'd rather be interested in the opposite device converting speech into breath.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
So that's how Darth Vader's helmet works...