FreeSpeech

Inspiration

This project seeks to assist individuals with speech impairments. Our team’s passion stems from those who are struggle to communicate, such as individuals with limitations like ALS. Communication is a fundamental aspect of mental health, limiting this really creates an overwhelming sense of isolation, which quickly leads to an individual decline. Our goal is to ease communication for afflicted individuals by allowing them to in a sense telepathically communicate via a headset, which reads brain activity, and a web interface to all round boost quality life and return to individuals this critical part of life.

What it does

Our project requires a muse 2 headset. After pairing, the user is presented with a welcome display to our application, which takes the user to the communicator. In the menu the user will have three inputs, if the user envisions raising their right arm, the box on the right will become selected, and the mirror effect if the user envisions raising their left arm. To confirm the selection, the user can blink. That box will then be subdivided into more boxes where the user can iterate this process down to a box with a single character, then that character will be added into the text box. Over time the user may communicate by typing out their thoughts in this fashion. Finally the user can complete the phrase.

How we built it

The GUI stack consisted of python, tkiter and Canvas

Challenges we ran into

First and most foremost, there was a lot of teams participating in the hackathon, for most of us, trying to tackle a very large problem, with many scripts and components hindered our team in being cohesive challenged our collaborative ability. Secondly, everyone in the group had their own busy schedules so trying to work around everyone's schedule proved a challenge. Lastly, our group faced issues collecting inputs and translating that into readable data which we needed to analysis, filter, and update our GUI. This could be improved with more time as more data collected would lead to more accurate results.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Among the team, we all enjoyed actually applying the theory in a real setting, where we got to utilize our skills to support a meaningful cause and work with what a few decades ago would be considered alien technology. Being able to read neural brain waves, interpret them and integrating that into our an application was an outstanding accomplishment for us.

What we learned

This project was the first time most of group tried our hands at neuro-technology, with it being the future to healthcare, this experience was critical to our development. With it being most of team member's first time working on a complicated project in a group setting, we also gained exposure to the difficulties it bears, in the real world this is almost always the case, we appreciate that we got to navigate those difficulties.

What's next for FreeSpeech

Although the application runs, there is still room for improvement such as; collecting more data resulting in more precise results. We can also implement a way to allow the user to be able to have a backspace feature where they can undo a character/word rather than starting over.