The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur has developed a novel application for assisting children diagnosed with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia. The invention named Assistive Application for Children with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia (AACDD) is invented by Professor Braj Bhushan and Professor Shatarupa Thakurta Roy from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur and Dr Alok Bajpai, a practicing psychiatrist from Kanpur. The application comes embedded with a device that helps children learn easily.
The application, an IIT Kanpur statement said, provides a training module currently available in the Hindi language for school-going children between Classes 1 and 5. The application is a touchscreen-based interface that involves auditory feedback, putting haptic sensation and motor movement to facilitate the acquisition and reproduction of Hindi letters. Later on, it is expected to include other languages as well.
The institute statement said: “Dyslexia and Dysgraphia are neurodevelopmental disorders that are characterised by slow and inaccurate word recognition. Developmental dyslexia causes difficulties with accurate and fluent word recognition and spelling, whereas Dysgraphia refers to the inability to write coherently.”
“No two dyslexic students present the same set of symptoms and hence there are many efforts undertaken by researchers to overcome these challenges,” it added.
According to Indian Pediatrics data, the IIT Kanpur statement said, the incidence of dyslexia in Indian primary school children has been reported to be between 2 per cent and 18 per cent, dysgraphia 14 per cent, and dyscalculia 5.5 per cent.
India is thought to have approximately 90 million people with varying degrees of learning disabilities and an average class in school has about five students with learning disabilities. Thus, such specially-abled children benefit from additional support that allows them to learn and function independently. This assistive technology developed by IIT Kanpur seeks to act as additional support to children with dyslexia and dysgraphia which caters to the services and devices that enable people with learning disorders to accomplish daily tasks; assist them in communication, education, work or recreation activities and ultimately help them achieve greater independence and enhance their quality of life, the institute statement said.
Professor Abhay Karandikar, Director, IIT Kanpur said: “Dyslexia and dysgraphia are two common conditions that may hamper a child's growth in the absence of proper support mechanism to guide them. Hence, this new invention from our team of experts has the potential to be a boon for children diagnosed with these conditions.Also, the inclusion of the Hindi language will provide ease of learning to Hindi-speaking users primarily.”
IIT Kanpur's Application And Its Function
The application assists children with a tracing task, where they have to follow a blue and a pink dot to trace Hindi letters. As a child starts tracing from the blue dot to the pink dot, a yellow line accompanies.
Since the other technologies presently available use the audio input to bypass the reading problem through text-to-speech, the Assistive Application for Children with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia (AACDD) from IIT Kanpur is unique in terms of integration of audio, visual, and haptic inputs, and retraining the brain networks through manipulation of basic geometric patterns of words – like lines, circles, etc, the institute added.
