An innovative application has been created by a team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur to help children who have been diagnosed with dyslexia and dysgraphia.
According to a release from IIT Kanpur, the programme offers a training module that is now available in the Hindi language for students in Classes 1 through 5. The programme has a touchscreen interface and uses motor movement, haptic feedback, and aural input to make learning and copying Hindi characters easier. Other languages are anticipated to be added later.
The creators of the Assistive Application for Children with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia (AACDD) are Professor Braj Bhushan, Shatarupa Thakurta Roy, and practising psychiatrist Alok Bajpai from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Kanpur.
The programme helps kids with a task that requires them to trace Hindi letters by following a blue and a pink dot. A yellow line follows the youngster as they begin to trace from the blue dot to the pink dot.
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, such as lines, circles, etc. Other currently available technologies use the audio input to bypass the reading problem through text-to-speech. "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,” it said.