CA²JU: an Assistive Tool for Children with Cerebral Palsy

This paper presents CA2JU, a hardware/software tool that aims to help individuals with severe speech or language problems in their communication in order to promote their social and digital inclusion. CA2JU is composed of two applications: CA2JU Accelerated, which makes typing faster by suggesting potential words to the user; and CA2JU Illustrated, which automatically converts a sentence of words into a sequence of pictographic symbols, allowing a user familiar with the symbols to verify whether the written sentence is correct. We have implemented, evaluated in a controlled scenario, and deployed CA2JU in a real environment with children with cerebral palsy. In the controlled settings, the results confirm CA2JU Accelerated speed up typing by reducing the number of clicks made by users, and CA2JU Illustrated obtained high accuracy by suggesting the correct pictograms from sentences. In the real scenario, the two use cases show that the children improved their communication and linguistic abilities.