President's Message

I think it was my third month in DACS. We had just moved our monthly meetings from Brookfield Library to Datahr Rehabilitation Center, when Shirley Fredlund rose to ask for volunteers for Voice for Joanie, a program she had founded to provide computer-assisted speech to victims of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. In response to Shirley’s plea, a new SIG was created in DACS to help coordinate volunteers, and an appeal was launched for charitable contributions and donations of used equipment.

Voice for Joanie had gotten its start 18 months earlier as a memorial to Shirley’s friend Joan Margaitis, a resident of Morris and victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease which causes the body to reject its own nerve cells, resulting in muscle degeneration and paralysis. Through Shirley’s efforts, IBM had donated a portable computer, a voice synthesizer, and an infrared switching system that would enable Joanie to communicate by blinking to select words and phrases on the screen and having them spoken out through the system loudspeaker. Joanie’s life struggle, which ended just before the equipment arrived, became the inspiration for Shirley’s personal crusade, which through hard work and relentless publicity, had already brought the gift of speech to five other victims of ALS.

Today, after more than ten years in operation, Voice for Joanie has provided that gift of speech to more than 300 people throughout Connecticut and nearby New York State, and has 60 computer systems currently on loan to individuals suffering from ALS, MS, and traumatic injuries. Through its promotional efforts and technical support, DACS has been able to attract more than $25,000 in computer industry donations and awards, and has received recognition for its part from IBM, Microsoft and the Association of PC User Groups. We are proud of our contributions, but we humbly recognize that none of this could have happened without the dedication, persistence and hard work of Shirley and her loyal core of volunteers.

We will have more to say about Voice for Joanie; but it is important here to point out that the hardware used for ALS patients is just a small part of a growing field of computer technology that will revolutionize the way people with disabilities–and perhaps the rest of us–communicate and interact with our environment. It’s called Augmentative and Alternative Communication, and it will be the subject of our next monthly meeting on February 6.

A part of the billion-dollar Assistive Technology industry, AAC seeks to develop tools for people unable to speak or otherwise communicate. In addition to ALS and MS patients, this technology has applications for victims of traumatic brain injury, stroke cerebral palsy and a wide range of learning disabilities. These are all conditions where computers can provide the flexibility, unlimited choice and continuous one-on-one attention required by people with special needs.

David Goldberg, president and service representative for Health Science, Inc. of Princeton, NJ, will explore the directions the assistive technology market is taking, and demonstrate some of the cutting-edge products his company provides. These can include switches that are activated by unconventional means, such as movement of the head, eye, chin, foot or arm (or by proximity, with no movement at all); alternative input devices including special keypads, touchscreens and voice activation; and feedback tools such as word prediction, abbreviation expansion and speech conversion.

That is quite a mouthful. But if all this seems esoteric and unrelated to everyday computing, think about voice recognition–an alternative communication tool for a persistent minority of the workplace disabled: higher level managers with type O qwertyosis. This and many other changes in office automation, environment control and robotics, will eventually revolutionize the way we all work, manage our homes and organize our leisure.

--Allan Ostergren
dacsprez@aol.com