AAC4All

LIFAT

Jean-Yves Antoine

Full professor
Anaïs Halftermeyer
Assistant Professor (LIFO)
Frédéric Rayar
Assistant Professor
Cherifa Ben Khelil
PhD research engineer
LIFAT is the research laboratory in Computer Science of the University of Tours. Three main application fields unite the activities in the lab, among which Health and Disability that concerns technical aids for the people suffering from physically disabilities or autism, image analysis for diagnosis assistance, visual data mining of medical data, etc. The BdTln Team at LIFAT has a long-standing expertise in Natural Language Processing applied to AAC, which originated with the development of the HandiAS AAC system. Then a 20-years long collaboration with the Kerpape Rehabilitation Center and the Garches New Technologies Platform (PFNT) led to the successive development of the highly adaptative Sibylle puis le système LifeCompanion systems. In parallel, the RFAI team has developed technical aids for people visually impaired.

Roles :

Jean-Yves Antoine : head of the AAC4All project AAC4All, scientific leader of WP0 and WP3. Participant for WP 2 and WP5.
Anaïs Halftermeyer : WP1, WP2, WP3 and WP5
Frédéric Rayar : WP2, WP3 and WP4
Cherifa Ben Khelil : WP3 and WP5

CMRRF Kerpape

Logo VYV
Logo centre mutualiste de Kerpape
Mathieu THEBAUD

Engineer, CAA Referent & LifeCompanion Designer

Willy ALLEGRE

Engineer PhD, Assistive Technology Lab Coordinator & CTO of CoWork’HIT

Mael CHEVANCHE

Engineer, Home Automation Referent

Located in Lorient Kerpape Rehabilitation Center  is one of the major rehabilitation centers in France with more than 400 patients every day and more than 600 professionals on site. It belongs to the national mutualist union VYV 3 Bretagne

Since the 1980s, Kerpape is a unique place in France to have an integrated laboratory in which engineers are dedicated to assistive technologies (including AAC) and integrated into support or on research, development and innovation missions. This approach – clinical activities for the patients and Open Innovation – has enabled the laboratory and more broadly the Center to be considered as a leader at the national level on the theme of assistive technologies.

The laboratory has been collaborating since the 2000s with Garches hospital and the LIFAT on tools and research projects around AAC and IT accessibility, in particular Sibylle and Predict4All. Since 2015, the laboratory has been developing LifeCompanion, a free and open-source software for communication support and digital access. LifeCompanion is now distributed thanks to the support of CoWork’HIT.

 

Roles

Kerpape Rehabilitation Center is responsible for the “WP1: AAC Platform”, especially for :

  • The development of an open AAC software platform in which experiments can be conducted (based on LifeCompanion)
  • The deployment of a recommendation web platform in which the actors of the ecosystem around the AAC can be guided

Kerpape will also be involved in all the WP of the project, in particular on the focus groups allowing to involve professionals and clinical evaluations (WP6).

 

CHU Garches

Logo PFNT de Garches
Samuel POUPLIN
Occupational Therapist PhD
Olivia ZELLER
Occupational Therapist
Célia GUIMBERTEAU
Occupational Therapist MSc
Soizic RIEGEL
Occupational Therapist
The Plate-Forme Nouvelle Technologies (PFNT) is a consulting, demonstration, training and research unit in the field of new technologies applied to people with disabilities, located at the Raymond Poincaré Hospital. Initially focused solely on assistive robotics (in 1995), it has gradually opened up to other information and communication technologies, such as information technology, Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and home automation. Because of its hospital environment, its operating mode and its missions, the PFNT is a unique structure in France and recognised throughout the country. The PFNT has a transversal activity on the hospital structure since the team intervenes in all the services in the hospital. It also welcomes external people from all over France for day hospitalisation.

Roles :

The PFNT coordinates the ecological assesment on a large panel of users. There are two main objectives:

Design and evaluate the platform components by integrating the concepts and requirements in terms of functionality and usability
Evaluation of the completed platform – A clinical study will focus on 20 people with disabilities per site (Garches, Kerpape), accompanied by health professionals (occupational therapist and speech therapist) in the context of their current practice.


Samuel Pouplin : coordinator WP 6, participant WP 0 à 6
Olivia Zeller : WP 6
Celia Guimberteau : WP 6
Soizic Riegel : WP 6

MoDyCo

Logo Modyco
Caroline Bogliotti
Assistant Professor
Aude Julien Da Cruz Lima

Engineer

Iris Eshkol-Taravella
Full Professor
Karin Heidlmayr
Assistant Professor
Frédéric Isel
Full Professor
The PNAV (Psycholinguistic, Neurocognition, Acquisitions and Variation) Team is interested in language functioning and language disorders in several speech and sign languages, in native and non-native speakers, by integrating behavioral, oculometric, and neurophysiological approaches. Beyond proposing empirical evidence on the mechanisms of language processing and production, we strive for the goal that our scientific results have a societal impact, both by developing assessment tools for clinicians, but also by assessing and supporting foreign language learning in the educational and social sector. For these diagnostic, assessment and learning support activities, the biomarkers tested in our EEG studies and validated more generally by the scientific community in different laboratories will be a valuable tool. Unlike behavioral markers, these biomarkers allow for a temporally fine-grained measure of ongoing linguistic processing in the brain. The Corpus-based Modeling and Linguistics team aims to develop and validate linguistic models in a bi-directional approach: on the one hand, by going from the facts attested in the corpora towards a model via the (semi-)automatic processing of generally annotated data; on the other hand, by focusing on the demonstrability of the hypotheses put forward and by testing the predictions resulting from the models. For this, three methods are used: (1) validation on corpus data: a qualitative or quantitative analysis of the data and in particular a fine-grained annotation of the corpus which allows both to test the models and to extract the relevant data for the elaboration of the models; (2) validation by simulation: the elaboration of a computer or mathematical model. This mode of validation is similar to the previous one when it comes to supervised learning on annotated data; (3) experimental validation, in collaboration with the PNAV team. This last one will be used in the AAC project.

Roles : in this Work Package (WP4), members of the Modyco Lab will propose the first experimental investigation of the comprehension skills of children with disabilities during pictogram processing. This study will allow us to understand to which extent these children construct the meaning of a message from the semantic unification of different pictograms.

We plan to collect oculometric data and electroencephalographic data (EEG). We are also involved in WP5 with LIG researchers. The goal of this WP is to develop serious games for an efficient appropriation of the AAC tools.

IRIT - équipe ELIPSE

Logo IRIT

Mathieu Raynal

Associate professor

Nadine Vigouroux

Research scientist

Frédéric Vella

Research scientist

Lisa Hoiry

PhD student

The Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) is one of the pillars of research in Occitanie with its 600 members, permanent and non-permanent, and about 100 external collaborators. Due to its multi-tutorial nature (CNRS, Toulouse Universities), its scientific impact and its interactions with other fields, the laboratory constitutes one of the structuring forces of the IT landscape and its applications in the digital world, both at regional and national level. The research project of the ELIPSE group (Etude de L’Interaction Personne SystèmE) is part of the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Its multidisciplinarity (cognitive sciences, HCI, computer science) makes it possible to treat Advanced Interaction Techniques (IAT) as research objects in order to develop models, new interaction techniques or devices, and as research tools to explore their impact on perception and human cognition. The work is carried out under the complementary angles of the Human (perception, cognition, behavior) and its Interactions (processes, models, technologies), points of view that we aim to combine within theoretical contributions, concrete implementations and experimentation. The research group is able to go as far as deploying and evaluating complex and varied interaction situations (Spatial interactive spaces such as augmented reality, tangible and multi-device interactions, Ambient Computing, Assistive technologies for blind and motor impaired users, Mobile Interactive Systems). An originality of the group, is that these technological deployments can bounce back on the study of the theoretical foundations relating to humans and their interactions.

Roles :

The members of the ELIPSE team are particularly involved in the design, development and evaluation of text input systems and in the integration of linguistic prediction systems within these input systems.

LIG

Logo LIG
Didier Schwab

Full Professor
UGA, LIG, leader.

Jérôme Goulian

Associate professor
UGA, LIG

Amélie Rochet-Capellan

Research scientist
CNRS, GipsaLab

Marion Dohen

Associate Professor
Grenoble INP, GipsaLab

Benjamin Lecouteux

Full Professor
UGA, LIG

The LIG is the Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory. It brings together nearly 450 researchers, professors, assistant-professors, PhD students and research support staff. Its 22 teams are organized in 5 axes summarized here. Within the Intelligent Systems for Bridging Data, Knowledge and Humans axis, the GETALP team is a multidisciplinary team (computer scientists, linguists, phoneticians, translators, etc.) whose objective is to address all the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of multilingual communication and information processing (written and speech). The team’s major research areas include automatic and interactive text clarification and machine-assisted dialog for people with disabilities. In particular, Didier Schwab is the designer and one of the main developers of Gazeplay, a free software that gathers several serious games playable with an eye-tracker. The latest version has about 60 games. The Getalp team also participates in the French-Swiss ANR project PROPICTO (Projection of Oral Language into PICTOgraphic Units) which addresses several areas of NLP (speech recognition, syntactic analysis of oral language, text simplification, automatic generation of pictograms). The methods resulting from this project are linked to AAC4All to allow disabled people, allophones, to have the possibility to develop their communication, their autonomy and their access to information. Finally, the GETALP team is a partner of the project through the informal group InterAACtion which gathers research and teaching on Alternative and Augmented Communication at the University of Grenoble Alpes, of which the GIPSA-Lab is a member.

Roles :

Members of LIG and GIPSA-Lab are involved in WP4 and WP5.

CoWork'HIT

Logo Co Work it
Willy ALLEGRE
Directeur Technique

Hébergé au CMRRF de Kerpape, le CoWork’HIT est un centre d’innovation, d’expertises et de moyens dont la mission principale est d’accompagner les entreprises, établissements de santé et médico-sociaux, associations et autres acteurs de l’innovation et du handicap.

Structuré sous forme de SCIC (Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif), il porte des valeurs coopératives fondamentales telles que la co-conception avec les usagers, la prééminence de la personne humaine, un sociétariat multiple ayant pour finalité l’intérêt collectif. Il accompagne le développement d’innovations technologiques, d’usages et d’organisations sur des volets techniques, cliniques, usages, réglementaires et marchés, visant à la fois un impact sociétal en réponse aux besoins des usagers mais également économique en soutenant la filière handicap.

L’un des principaux co-investisseur est VYV3 Bretagne faisant lien avec le CMRRF Kerpape. Le CoWork’HIT porte une offre de service autour de LifeCompanion à destination d’établissements et professionnels de santé (formation, accompagnement) mais également à destination d’entreprises (startup, PME, grands groupes) et de chercheurs sur l’adaptation ou l’utilisation de celui-ci.

 

Rôles

Le CoWork’HIT sera impliqué dans la définition d’un modèle économique autour du projet et d’assurer sa diffusion afin d’assurer qu’AAC4ALL ait un impact clinique pratique dès le démarrage du projet mais aussi au-delà.