Chennai March 9, 2011: - Rohit Jain studying Sociology at Loyola College in Chennai stands out among peers. Born with cerebral palsy, he cannot speak as his vocal muscles are weak and neither is he able to achieve perfect muscle coordination in his limbs. Besides, lack of fine motor control skills prevent him from writing or typing. Despite all these challenges, Jain graduated from high school last year and registered for further studies. Jain’s determination would have taken him to his destination, but Chennai based Ajit Narayanan’s technology helped him mingle into mainstream more freely. He was one of the first users of Narayanan’s invention, Avaz.

There are an estimated 10 million people in India who suffer from speech impediments. They may not be able to talk but they have a lot to say. And they can benefit from Narayanan’s device. Avaz is a communication device for people with speech disorders such as cerebral palsy, autism, mental retardation, and aphasia.

Narayanan’ Avaz has won him a place on the prestigious MIT Technology Review’s India list of 18 innovators under the age of 35 called India TR35. Within this list of award-winning 18 young innovators who exemplify innovation in business and technology, Narayanan’s invention has got him a special title of Innovator of the year.

Each year, the editors of Technology Review honour the India TR35, a set of young innovators whose inventions and research they find most exciting. Their work—spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more—is changing this world. To shortlist this year’s India TR35 list, Technology Review Editors drew inputs on each of the 200 plus nominations from an eminent panel of two dozen researchers, inventors and technologists from industry and academia.

Avaz works by converting limited muscle movements, such as head or finger movements, into speech. His invention broadly falls under the category of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) technologies. Though speech generating devices are effective, most AAC devices aren’t within the reach of the speech-impaired persons in the developing world and they mostly generate speech in English. This is another deterrent which has prevented these devices from becoming as popular in the developing world.

“Narayanan’s innovation lies in bringing down the cost of the device to one-tenth of the price of similar devices, making it affordable to a wide swath of the Indian disabled population, and making it available in Indian languages,” says N Suresh, Editor of Technology Review India who led the INDIA TR35 initiative in India for the second year in a row. 

The India TR35 honorees will describe their revolutionary and inspiring work at the 3rd two-day emerging technologies conference—EmTech India—at Bangalore beginning March 22, 2011. The EmTech conference will feature eminent professors and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Medical School and several scientists from India.

“As India continues its journey to be a leader in innovation and entrepreneurship,, Technology Review decided to add India as the only other destination to hold the annual EmTech conference outside the USA,” says Jason Pontin, Editor in chief of MIT’s Technology Review based on the USA.  

Avaz works on the principle of scanning. It shows various options on a screen and presents a highlight that moves between the different options. When the highlight dwells upon the option that the child wishes to choose, the child makes a large muscle movement such as shaking the head or touching anywhere on the screen with the hand. This selects the highlighted option. When a full sentence has been constructed, Avaz converts the message into speech.

Scanning in Avaz is made faster using grouping, ordering, and prediction. The options are arranged in groups so that it is quicker to navigate and correct mistakes. The options are also arranged in optimized order of frequency which makes common words quicker to select. Avaz also tries to automatically predict words based on their starting alphabets and their preceding words. The child can now build a sentence under less than a minute using Avaz in text mode.

To cater to a wider spectrum of disabilities, Avaz is also available in picture mode with support for Indian languages. This technology, though developed for the differently-abled, has the potential of morphing into a technology for the people without disabilities too like when one is at the steering wheel of a car or when one isn’t familiar with the local language of the place of visit.

MIT Researchers to address EmTech at Bangalore
Among the global speakers, MIT’s Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and Professor of Chemistry, Dr Daniel G. Nocera’s session on the ‘Future of Energy’ and the Director of Laboratory for Advanced Biomaterials & Stem-Cell-Based Therapeutics, Harvard Medical School Dr. Jeffrey M. Karp’s special address on ‘Next Generation Regenerative Medicine’ are expected to be attended by over 500 people from R&D and Innovation community.  

A keynote on Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee will touch on the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. A session on ‘Location-Aware Wireless Networks’ by Moe Win of Aeronautics and Astronautics Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics would dwell on how scientists could deploy these (Wireless Networks) in humanitarian rescue efforts or even tracking terrorists.

Kent Larson who directs the Changing Places research group at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Living Labs initiative in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT will touch upon use of Ubiquitous Technologies.  Kent Lawson, known for experimenting with living areas to achieve zero-energy, mass customized, scalable Urban Housing, uses technologies and interfaces to understand and respond to human activity. These include persuasive thermostat using GPS location of occupants and a context-aware tunable LED lighting among others

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Technology Review (published by Technology Review Inc., an independent media company owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA and by Cyber Media India Limited in India, the oldest technology journal in the world set up in1899 aims to promote the understanding of emerging technologies and focuses on analyzing their commercial, social, and political impacts.) featured innovative technologies and solutions relevant to solving some of the most urgent challenges facing the nation.

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