Aphasia
From Openmoko
Three years ago Jane had a stroke which made her unable to speak. Her intelligence is unaffected, but she cannot find the words.
How can she use an OpenMoko mobile phone to communicate with her husband when the words are gone? When her husband is on the phone, asking - What are you doing? Do you want to have lunch with me?
To answer his first question about what she is doing, she’s using the OpenMoko phone to send him a small picture, showing a cup of tea. And then, a second picture with a heart, and he answers he loves her too. Then he asks if they can meet, he want to have a cup of tea as well, and she answers by sending him her GPS location (the OpenMoko phone is a GPS reciever) and he can hear the street address of the small restaurant where she is right now. If there was a phone that made all this possible, I bet she would want one. You've read a short story, capturing what this project is all about -- to build a very special mobile phone.
Q&A
- How did Jane find a picture of a cup of tea so quickly? From an almost unlimited amount of small pictures she could find the cup_of_tea picture in only a few seconds.
A: The pictures available on the OpenMoko screen depends on where you are. When Jane opened the door and stepped inside the little tea house the pictures on her OpenMoko changed to a set of pictures with some relevance to the situation she had to handle at that location. Tea brands, Buy, Pay the bill, Restroom, Taxi, Sugar, Lemon, you got he idea. And the heart is always there for her loved ones.
