Research on the development and the make of the assistive technology tools to promote communication ability for person with intellectual disabilities

1.自闭症是一种终生发育的神经生物学障碍。患有自闭症的儿童在与他人沟通和互动方面存在困难。我们开发并测试了一套五款PDA应用软件“图片助手”，用于需要广泛或普遍支持的智力残疾(包括自闭症)儿童。(1)辅助顺序程序，(2)定时器，。(3)语音图片卡，(4)文字老虎机图画游戏，(5)拼图。我们用许多可定制的图片设计了我们的有序程序辅助工具。定制是在PC上完成的。定制后，用户将新的应用软件传输到PDA。近年来，通过对语音进行随机建模，非特定人语音识别的准确率得到了显著的提高。然而，使用这些声学模型会导致具有不同语音风格的人的语音识别性能下降(例如，发音障碍)。我们曾试图为一个患有发音障碍的人(患有手足徐动型脑瘫的发音障碍者)建立声学模型。由于肌肉的拉伤，第一次发音的清晰度往往会变得不稳定，从而导致语音识别能力的下降，其中MFCC(MEL频率倒谱系数)被用作语音特征。因此，我们提出了一种基于主成分分析的稳健特征提取方法。通过单词识别实验验证了该方法的有效性。

1. Autistic disorder is a neurobiological disorder of development for one's lifetime. Children with autistic disorder have difficulty communicating and interacting with others. We developed and tested a suit of five PDA application software "Picture Aid" for Children with intellectual disability (include autistic disorder) need extensive or pervasive supports. (1) aid for ordinal procedure, (2) timer,. (3) picture card with voice, (4)words slot machine game with picture, and (5) puzzle. We designed our aid for ordinal procedure with many customizable pictures. Customization is done on a PC. After customization, user transmit new application software to PDA.2. Recently, the accuracy of speaker-independent speech recognition has been remarkably improved by use of stochastic modeling of speech. However, the use of those acoustic models causes degradation of speech recognition for a person with different speech style (e.g., articulation disorders). We had tried to build the acoustic model for a person with articulation disorders (a person with articulation disorders by athetoid type of cerebral palsy). The articulation of the first utterance tended to become unstable due to strain of a muscle and that caused degradation of speech recognition, where MFCC (Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) iwas used as speech features. Therefore we proposed a robust feature extraction method based on PCA (Principal Component Analysis) instead of MFCC. Its effectiveness was confirmed by word recognition experiments.