Tico Project

From Tico Project - Communicative interactive boards

The main idea that motivated this project was to move the traditional definition of a printed communication board towards a computing environment in order to take advantage of the capabilities that it provides.

The initial objective of this project was the design and development of a software tool, making it easier for people with severe disorders in oral expression to interact with the environment, and increasing their level of independence and opportunities. Moreover, the application is equipped with a scanning function that sequentially selects the elements present on the board. This function can be used with physical devices other than mouses, and provides people with motor disabilities with accessibility.

Given the versatility of the program, the second objective was for TICO to be used as a means of access to different areas of the curriculum, through the design of activities prepared for this purpose. Finally, TICO was designed as an interface for future environment control implementations, enabling its use outside communication.

The TICO project consists of two separate and different, but complementary applications: the Editor and the Interpreter.

• The Editor enables the creation of communication boards adapted to individual needs and characteristics of each user. From this application, we can define and configure all the elements-visual, auditive, environment control, etc.- that make up the board, and will be used both for the communication and for the implementation of actions that control the environment.

• The Interpreter allows the end user to use the previously designed boards to overcome communication limitations. This application is equipped with the scanning function to enable full access to those people with serious motor disabilities.

One of the most important things, and the one that has taken most work, is the accumulation of user-selected cells at the bottom of the screen window, which allows to generate and articulate sentences with a syntactic structure similar to that used in spontaneous oral communication.