Imagine that tomorrow you wake up as you are used to
and they can not communicate, they can not talk to their parents,
with your friends, with your children.
This happened to my grandmother.
And that’s why today I’m here.
Do you know how many people today, in the world, can not communicate?
About 67 million people, according to the WHO, can not communicate.
Nineteen times the population of the province of Córdoba.
Do you know what this number is in our country?
Nearly 500,000 people, today, in Argentina, can not communicate
by cerebral palsy, autism, aphasia, Down syndrome.
This half a million people can not communicate,
but it has communicative intention.
He wants to tell ideas, he wants to go to the bathroom,
it means that he wants someone.
Do you know how people with disabilities, today, communicate?
With a heavy printed pictogram book.
A pictogram is an image that represents an action or an object,
that the person points to express what he wants.
Today, in 2016, when with my brother we saw that this
It was one of the latest standards in alternative communication,
we realized that it was not acceptable.
It is not acceptable that, today, someone is communicating by pointing.
Point to a paper.
That’s why, well, we decided to create an application.
A mobile application that uses these pictograms.
The important thing is to understand that the pictograms are the code
of universal communication that people with disabilities have.
Like most people here,
we learn to read and write through letters and words,
People with disabilities, when they are born, begin to understand
that meaning of images and they begin to communicate through them.
We realized that we had to start from that base, from those images,
and we created an application that uses these pictograms.
There are about 22,000 pictograms
across the spectrum to communicate.
Twenty two thousand.
We create an application that uses them and makes communication
much easier and more efficient for those who can not communicate today.
We realized, by working and by being in contact
with people with disabilities, of three very important things.
One is the importance of communication.
The communication allows me to be here today commenting what we did.
Communication allows us to tell who we are, each one of you.
It allows us to count, it allows us to get to know each other.
It allows us to show who we are.
We realized that importance.
We also realized
that technology is already available to do something better than it already was.
That already exists
That you just have to see how we can do to join pieces
and start to improve the quality of life
of people who can not communicate today.
And another thing that we realized,
that was also very important to understand,
to reach what we develop today,
it is the importance of the environment in communication.
If we are in a bar chatting with friends
and suddenly they call us to go somewhere else,
we adjust the communication to the environment very fast.
We do it intuitively, we do not have to even think about it.
But as you saw before, and as I could tell you,
People with disabilities use printed images to communicate.
They have to look through leaves and leaves to indicate what they want.
The environment is very important.
So when we started to develop an application, we realized
that many of us, here, have mobile devices in our pockets.
Yes?
They have sensors and they understand the environment, the context in which we are.
Why? Because he knows the time of day, the agenda that I have,
the activities that I will do during the day.
Know the weather, the GPS point.
So with that and with a predictive algorithm that we are developing
from here, from Córdoba,
we could make that of the 22,000 pictograms there are
the application will result in the four most accurate
to the environment in which you find yourself, to be able to put together a phrase
with the images and sound of the device.
When we had a version of this prepared, we went to try it
to the geriatric where my grandmother was.
And it did not work.
We could not make her communicate with that.
After working so long to be able to solve
That personal problem and not being able to do it, well, it was strong.
Talking to the director of the geriatric
he told us not to give up
that we kept trying, that he saw a value to what we were doing.
So we got in touch
with another Carlos Paz special education center
and we went to try it with children with different disabilities.
The following week,
we are at the bottom of a common school course.
Sitting there were 20 guys, more or less.
We are sitting at the back of the room, next to Mati,
A seven-year-old boy with cerebral palsy.
We show you a couple of examples of how to use the application
And he was able to create a phrase.
It was voiced.
At that time, the 20 guys who were there
they turned to see what had happened.
Because for seven years, Mati was in a wheelchair, sitting in the back.
There, there was always one person, but there was never a word.
He could never communicate anything.
At that time, we really realized what we had done
from an apartment in Nueva Córdoba
following a dream and trying to improve the quality of life
of people with disabilities.
As I told you before, there are about 67 million people in the world
that today they are not being able to communicate.
So…
How many ideas, how much love, how many stories, how many “I love you”,
How many “I love you” are we losing?
Today, our application allows you to communicate to more than 1100 people
that generate about 33,000 phrases per month
33,000 “I love you”, 33,000 “I’m fine”,
33,000 “How are you?”
When we have been able to meet that goal of someone exceeding
the barrier of communication,
we can feel satisfied, with my brother, Hector,
that we meet our goal.
And now I leave you with Mati.
(Applause)
(Video) Brush your teeth? Put it
(Voice synthesizer) Hi, I want to brush my teeth.
Great! (Laughter)
Great!
Mati will answer you, will you?
Dale, let’s see, Mati. Say hello
Say hello
(Voice synthesizer) Hello, hello.
Say hello.
(Voice synthesizer) Hi, how are you?
(Voice synthesizer) Hi, I’m fine. Thank you very much.
I answer!
(Applause)
(Synthesizer of you) Hi, I’m hungry.
Hi Five!
Thank you.
(Applause)
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