Tangible interface for a rehabilitation of comprehension in aphasic patients

This paper describes a tangible user interface (TUI) built to be used for written and spoken comprehension therapy in aphasic patients. The tool works with the Trackmate system [1] and an application especially designed from clinical tools developed by speech and language therapists. The software implements a series of tasks that ask the disabled person to identify, from a set, tagged objects and put them on the sensing table to be recognized by the TUI system. At the end of each exercise, the percentage of identification is saved into a database, which records patients’ performances according to the time and the task types. This information technology (IT) was chosen and adapted to the aphasia rehabilitation to take the advantage of the manipulation of physical objects, in order to ensure an effective transfer of training exercises into everyday life activities.