

Sometimes it’s enough when friends begin a sentence. We know straightaway what they mean. In a foreign country we communicate by using hands and feet.
And now people who are limited in their speech – tracheostomy patients for instance – can access support too.
Working with an ICU in a British hospital, a Belfast-based company has developed an app which helps facilitate non-verbal communication using artificial intelligence.
An anonymized video of a patient’s lip movements is sent to a cloud server for comparison and converted into text which is then read back out loud by the app.
Currently the technology recognizes 20 word combinations, enabling communication between patients and carers/medical staff. That figure will soon increase to 50.
Lip service with impact!