ACAT and
Apparition Online
We are currently developing affordable software to help people with Cerabral Palsy, or disabilities that stop them being able to move most of their body.
Introduction
Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) is an open source platform developed at Intel Labs to enable people with motor neuron diseases and other disabilities to have full access to the capabilities and applications of their computers through very constrained interfaces suitable for their condition.
More specifically, ACAT enables users to easily communicate with others through keyboard simulation, word prediction and speech synthesis. Users can perform a range of tasks such as editing, managing documents, navigating the Web and accessing emails.
ACAT has been used by individuals with a wide range of disabilities, including ALS, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury.
For the Nerds amongst us
ACAT is built on top of the Open Source Computer Aided Accessibility Toolkit (OACAT), which is itself built on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS). ACAT has been used by individuals with a wide range of disabilities, including ALS, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury.
The Intel® Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) is an open source platform designed to enable people with motor neuron diseases and other disabilities to have full access to the capabilities and applications of their computers through very constrained interfaces suitable for their condition. More specifically, ACAT enables users to easily communicate with others through keyboard simulation, word prediction and speech synthesis. Users can perform a range of tasks such as editing, managing documents, navigating the Web and accessing emails.
A HIstory of ACAT
ACAT was originally developed by researchers at Intel Labs for Professor Stephen Hawking, through a very iterative design process over the course of three years. Professor Hawking was instrumental to the design process and was a key contributor to the project design and validation. After Intel deployed the system to Professor Hawking, they turned their attention to the larger community and continued to make ACAT more configurable to support a larger set of users with different conditions.
Their hope was that, by open sourcing this configurable platform, developers will continue to expand on this system by adding new user interfaces, new sensing modalities, word prediction and many other features. ACAT is designed to run on Microsoft Windows* machines and can interface to different sensor inputs such as infrared switches, camera, push buttons, and more.
ACAT is available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. With the help of the user/developer community, we are working on extending it to other languages.
The ACAT toolkit was developed in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio* 2015 and .NET 4.5. It runs on Microsoft Windows 7 or newer and is distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.