raghul127 / gigatessaract

Team Gigatessaract

The one thing that unites Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Tom Cruise, Richard Branson and Steven Spielberg is Dyslexia. The very fact that these great men grew over their disabilities to become prospective in their own fields gives me and my team hope on to creating level grounds for people affected by dyslexia.

The problem:
This disorder among kids often leads to impaired self-esteem , depression and isolation and as a result, one can sadly wonder just how many gifted and creative dyslexics have been blocked from fulfilling their genetic destinies and potential. All too often, learning-disabled children grow up to be underemployed adults, shunted into routine, dead-end occupations for life and this injustice is what we are trying to eradicate.

A deeper look into the disorder: Dyslexia is a chronic long-term illness, characterized by difficulty with learning to read fluently, with accurate comprehension despite normal intelligence. This includes difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, processing speed, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, language skills/verbal comprehension, and/or rapid naming. Their disability does not affect their intelligence, but it does interfere with their ability to recognize words, understand the meaning of a sentence and make sense of written language.

Although many different factors may contribute to dyslexia, the link between a child's reading ability and auditory processing skills appears to be a "highly significant relationship” and this is what our solution will exploit. The reading disability does not affect intelligence, but it does interfere with the ability to recognize words, understand the meaning of a sentence and make sense of written language.

How big an impact can the solution to this problem create:
Around the world, on an average out of every 100 people chosen, 10-20 people are likely to have dyslexia. The incidence of dyslexia in India is believed to be as high as 15%. Breaking down this number we see that there are 228,994,454 students enrolled in recognized schools(according to the Times of India), which brings our count of dyslexic Indian students to nearly 35 million. Yet, Indian Schools aren’t able to focus on improving the dyslexic communication situation present. Another study according to the Ministry of Science and Technology states that “nearly 70%-80% of students diagnosed with the learning disability have deficits in reading as well” and this is a clear sign of an exploding count of dyslexic students.

Our solution:
Our solution does not strive to change the way dyslexic kids see and communicate with the world, but how we can try and understand what they perceive. We plan on implementing an Optical Character Recogniser, (OCR) that can take text written by dyslexic child as input and converts it into comprehensible output. This will solve the problem of existing communication gap by keeping both the dyslexic person and the other interlocutor in their comfort zones.

How do we seek to achieve this:
We can let the person with the disorder write down what he wants to, scan the written text using either a phone camera or a webcam. Writing is one of their main disability. A progressive solution to help them would be to use assistive technology.

A software which recognises the handwritten text of an individual with dyslexia and uses machine learning algorithms to try and make meaningful sentences from the perceived words. The solution can be implemented as both a mobile application and as a web application to improve the versatility. To complete the two way trip of a conversation the application will also include a text to speech converter which will allow people to type down the information to be conveyed to the person with the disability, as dyslexic people have the ability to understand better when listening than reading. The second part of the project will only be required if the mode of communication is strictly written.

After the hackathon is over, we plan to take this idea a step further by developing an integrated kit for dyslexic people, where more features will be implemented such as a software that filters noises making sure that they can concentrate more in class, giving them the all needed special attention; an application that lets them connect to other dyslexic people they can relate to, plus an immediate group of consulting specialists if they ever feel depressed and much more.

Consraints and Known Issues:

• The quality of the picture relies heavily on the camera.
• Getting 100% accuracy with a machine learning model is very ideal.
• We dream to make the world a better place by developing assistive technology that can ensure comfort to specially abled people. Give us the opportunity and we will prove that we have the potential to take the world we live in, a huge leap forward.