you as always darla is a speech language pathologist for p r c company and her job i always five find fascinating because it involves not only therapies but involves electronics to bring about a good result for people who have problems communicating how long have you been with with the company dar i've been with the print your own the company for over twenty five years so i got my undergraduate degree and graduate from the university of pittsburgh and i worked for a bit and they hired me and they hire speech language pathologists and special educators and occupational therapists as consultants to help people  with an alternative form of communication and they were far ahead of their time in what exactly is the company doing for people who have difficulty in communication with with speech and hearing well the company started over forty years ago and it with ed print key and barry rowe make the sprint company and they were looking to find a way for disabled veterans to access the telephone and so they were tinkerers in their garage and came up with an automatic phone dialing system for those who were paralyzed and couldn't and the companies evolved since then so we're a small company we're known as a kind of a family a mom and pop company there we've been in business probably longer than any other company in this field other companies are known better because of i say because they have their marketing strategies but which are very good but we've been in the field for over forty years  as they were developing these devices to help with this communication i recall years ago and it really wasn't that long were they almost like a game board and they had these little squares with in plastic cases kind of frames and you touch these these frames you get a response so what are they actually looking to do well first of all the devices have evolved over the years they were really big were clunky they were heavy and now they're much more streamlined and they're based on tablets and the purpose their main purpose is for communication somebody can't speak because of autism down syndrome cerebral palsy or ellis lou gehrig's disease you may have seen people on television now football players who were there were commercials i think during the super bowl where somebody was using  system so there are different populations from birth from childhood to adulthood to death and how people that are being paralyzed quadriplegic plagiarists have the ability to use one of these devices if somebody has a brain stem injury if somebody is paralyzed from the neck down if somebody is all they could do is move their eyes then they can access and i gaze unit for example that's on this system so they just look and the screen is calibrated to their eyes and so they don't have to do anything but look and do well or focus for set amount of time on the key and so the this is for people again who can't do touch access so let's start with one of the touch access you know it's that you have what do you call these these are this is the accent we thought you know what do you speak with i speak with an accent anyway so all of these devices are the same they're just based on different tablets sizes so this is an eight inch screen this is a ten inch screen this is twelve inches and the size of the screen is chosen depending on a person's ability to see it and to access it so these are meant to be more portable kids can carry them around there's a handle and you could put a strap on it and you can have different color rims i have my pittsburgh steeler accent here so  black and gold black and yellow so when i talk about touch access that means that i have to touch it and i open up to an activity row that will say you know my name is mike and i could program in money and money your system it's unique to our system every company everybody has to use if somebody can't spell because we have little ones who use the system we have people who are in group homes and in nursing homes they were never taught to read and s so some way you have to take all the words in your head and put them on a board in front of you and get to them in a very systematic way because if you think about everything you want to say is no longer can be accessed through your mouth you have to put it in some type of system you're unable to write it down so run able to write for different reasons we have a lot of kids who can't spell so everybody uses a picture but it's the way that these systems use the pictures that's very different so they're all so varied and amount of  cons right this one i have a lot of icons showing there's eighty four keys showing this system was developed by bruce baker and he's a linguist and he is here in the pittsburgh area he's in castle shannon and his company is called semantic compaction and he study he was speaking with individuals who couldn't speak and all they had was a big head stick maybe with two pictures on a left tray and he thought everybody said this woman is smart and she understands but yet she has no way to communicate other than yes no he said well you know i'm a linguist let's see if i could figure something out so i looked at different language systems  that are used hieroglyphics is one and you use a picture in the picture the hieroglyph changes meaning depending on its context that's how it works here so for example if i hit the drink button here the screen changes and in green i have actions i could say drink or drinks or drinking or drink of all my ever so i could say drink or my blue word you drink it's it's the adjective it's a describe more drinks i'm thirsty so you have your choice so you see you're building a network of meanings this isn't just a picture of a drink it also represents juice and then i could say as well so when i learned the system i could start to say i need coffee was a pretty cool so when people look at it for the very first time this is way too much or my child is not smart enough or cognitively intact or or teachers and therapists are overwhelmed a start to start but we have a lot of support and training and it becomes so much fun once you start learning to encode so for example ed if i hit the bed what action do you think he would bring a sleep ok and you can eat and there's also your food subcategories so i do have to tell you i do have i don't have any polish food in here but you could program but you know there's japanese and i could so the difference in these communication systems is a lot of times the first thing people think of is they want to put a lot of nouns of kids want to request they want to say ball they want to play ball or they want to jump on  so that leads to a lot of requesting behaviors and communication is so much more than that so we are teaching them the language to start to put their own words together to do their own messages are you able to admit emotion without any of these you know this synthesizers that are in here and this is synthesize speech it's artificial it sounds pretty natural it sounds pretty good it sounds better than you and there's a variety of voices in here so again i'm using touch select but we have there are male voices female kids voices we have several synthesizer options so you can have the eighteen t voices that you hear on the phone that they take the different phone names and put them together synthesize it together and you could record speech and that's that's recording the speech is comes in handy we're talking about the populations from children to adults so this is  program where an adult say again they can only access through this eye gaze unit and you can go in here and go to my keyboard and spell and there's work predictions so when i do the letter b you see i have words that are predicted up here so if i want to say business my volume is down a little bit low so people can spell they can also go to messages turn up my volume  volume so people can do this all independently i'm using my hands right again you can use it with his eye gaze system so you can go to messages and have some preprogrammed quick messages in here this is different again an adult who has lost their ability to speak whether it be due to head trauma ls and mass they typically want to go to have some quick messages in there and spell things so you can have messages for social  your family members wanted to say it's always hard you can anticipate a few of the messages but we're always creating our own novel sentences so that's why a lot of people spell will encode it and there's also tools because one of the things that people love to do is talk show pictures of their family members or their pets so i have my pets category and you can import photographs and there's cameras built in so you can use a device to take the picture and so you can touch the picture and have a recorded message and this is really vital especially for those individuals who you know that the it's a nerd to generally of disease scuse me where they're going to lose their ability to use their hands and their speech so you want to capture your voice as much a voice as you can and recorded in here that's awesome and there you could you could do that in a variety of ways so you're really making this device that's kind of sterile very personal it's very personal and this is this is a huge huge thing i have a button that says ask me why i'm not talking and that's because funding for these devices is getting very tricky now because of all insurance cuts with the and i don't i don't know if i want to say a bomb i care but i do want to say that medicare is now medicare had agreed to pay for to fund the devices but they they just reissued a coverage reminder that says we agreed to pay for a device that has voice we didn't agree to pay for a device that will allow you to access the internet to take pictures to text message other people so any of those features must be removed so this is now they want to turn it back into just a speaking device you can only speak to somebody face to face it's like saying we agree to pay for your artificial leg when you need to go to the doctor but you can't use that artificial leg to do anything else they call a government well  it's tricky so a lot of organizations are really helping to educate the this the c m s centers for medicare and medicaid and our concern is we have a lot of adults with cerebral palsy who have their own business and they use these devices to access the computer to do computer programming because again they don't have the physical ability to do you know how do they link to the computer you can this is all this is a built in system so for example i could go in and hide show and it becomes it becomes this is based on windows eight so it's a desktop it's a desktop as well and so they can go on to facebook email and all of that is crucial to somebody is quality of life absolutely and so that's where in in the days when the initial agreement from medicare was that you know will pay for a voice i put system that's really all they were back then but things have evolved in ten years look at our cars look at nothing like they used to be there look at all phones you know how many people would go back to their phone that just to make a phone call go like this there were these little red and green if somebody cannot touch access and if somebody to use an eye gaze system you have to be fairly stable it's hard to use and i get system outside because of the sun you know when you try to use an a t m in the sunshine so there are different ways if you can access it with your hands then you find a switch location your occupational therapist can find out some people use their head and they hit the switch on you so you heard click you can hear it clicking that feedback is really important sometimes you switches and you put the buy the new whatever body part they have the most control of and there are children who who are just so physically involved and they they're sitting in the chair they may be sitting like this their heads down they don't have the tone they're two and three years old and you're wondering how can i help how can i start finding a way to help them communicate right you know early kid speak they start speaking early on and they start putting one word they say one word and then when they get a core vocabulary set of about fifty they put two words together and say mommy yup daddy shirt mommy go and so we want to give them the ability so we may start off again this is all the same system it's just different configurations so i may start them off with a switch and they may want a big switch might be better but they may smash it they hit the switch this is set up for auditory problems because maybe they're not looking so they hit the switch and you hear a problem every time they hit the ball which is saying your turn then they hit the switch and they say turn me it's my turn or turn the light on or turn me around or you know whatever so the whole idea is to give somebody access that's the first thing and there are evaluation centers around who are very good at this the i can talk clinic the  institute dr kathy hill does a lot of the valuations children's therapy center here and peters they do a lot of work so you find you know schools have assisted technology people and there's so much going on in so much technology there's a lot to know so there are people who specialize in this field so the system has offered across the country it is and internationally so there's spanish synthesizers it's in germany they're a place a says into your zip code and you type in your zip code and it comes up with your regional consultant so that's for all of the united states and there's a little picture in a bio of someone who can help and so so my role or anybody employed by the print company or on salary is educators and i do a lot of in services and consultations and trainings and you know and i do a lot of family support so you're right there it's all of the united states and we also have distributors in other countries and it's it's all pretty amazing and i've seen these evolve with you over the years and these are really hard to work you know there are a lot of different ways to help kids and help individuals communicate and really the goal is when someone asks me to come in for a consultation and there's there's no charge for that and there's no charge because i'm a salaried educator and my salary is paid through the sales of the device now what's really been happening is the i pad has come into this into this market for individuals with disabilities and that's been very good the i pad it has done a lot to make people aware of issues and needs of injured individuals with disabilities it's become however an ease i want to be careful because i don't want to misrepresent  anybody or anybody's intentions but it's my perception that sometimes when you have kids or kids going the school they'll just buy the i pads across the board so these are for children with disabilities to use for their classroom assignments which is great but now it's also for kids with disabilities and it's become a flat recommendation without doing a novell saying we're just going to give you an i pad with and you pick an ap and the i pad with an app has no support and then so many times family members say they have a child with autism and they say i want to help them so let me find an app and then they get they pick the app and then they go to school and say here we bought this i with an app so use this and it may not be appropriate so that's why different of else enters and there are people to help so this would work as well if you had a service dog you want to call your service dog  you could program voice right you know there was a young man and this was several years ago he was using a an up to go head porn or so it was before i gaze was available and every time he would make a selection it would be up and if you hear it you know that beep well the dog actually needed that beep and so he would run out of the room every time he saw someone coming with that but you can turn those beeps off and you can you can train them to it but if you have a voice in there and they start to learn you know how smart so yeah it is it's a lot of fun there are people who their cats come with it they come with the sound of their voice because they recognize that this is the voice and there's a choice of a lot of voices the voices what is the younger sage those using one of these where you know that you're aware of that's a really good question because it all depends on the willingness of individuals people are often afraid that if i use this system my child won't speak so we have kids as young as two years old or earlier starting getting the cause effect you know with the system and i have to tell you that these will never inhibit speech they encourage speech it's almost like you struggle you know you can't do but when you have a plan b plan a is always to speak but when you have a plan b something to help you then you go for that but if plan is starts to work you're going to discard everything else so these will not inhibit speech they encourage we hear kids vocal lot more they may not speak words yet but you hear them vocalizing a lot more so in your in your training process you chain you train the individual that needs it but you also chain train the family around them my role is as an educator so i will get a call from from different therapy centers and the schools and say you know i have somebody i'm not sure what to do can you bring your equipment and so it's a consultation i don't do a val's because i'm on salary and i have a vested interest in the company but i bring the equipment i know my kryten equipment really well and i work with the team the speech the o t the teachers everybody involved explain how it works i'll get on the floor and play with the kids and show how to model the language so that's my role and then i do follow up trainings online trainings we provide a lot of support on the website and a lot affiliating we have a lot of businesses that are affiliated one is the center for ac and autism center for eighteen autism dot com and there's a wonderful strategy called language acquisition through motor planning where it's lamp and we learn that you know we learn things through motor movement you learn how to play a piano through motor planning and actually want to do that you know even looking at  what happens is that people develop a motor plan for these things when you have a motor plan it reduces the cog the cognitive load so that means you don't have to think which one is it you start to learn this this is how you say sleep and this is they they learned that pattern and it's really amazing people say no my kids can't do it and i will tell you they do it same thing are sitting at a keyboard  but what happens when word prediction it breaks your motor pattern because you're typing but then you have to look up to see what word you are is that really slows things down and you have to do that because that word that's being put on the in your text message or whatever ebell by not be the one you want to use right yeah so it's it's a huge this strategy called lamp and it's at the center for a t c and autism we do a lot of seminars for that so impaired and have multiple physical disabilities and when you wonder how can somebody you know helen keller's always the classic example how do you help somebody who can't see they can't hear and they can they can hardly move  and their strategy is to do that so bruce baker the linguist and counsel shannan every month has training seminars that are free specially love local pittsburgh people to come in there two and a half days and educating people on the language system and also very different speakers who command to talk about access and even case this terrible and pretty secure surround that's the thing you know the one thing about i pads is that the screen cracks it can crack fairly easily and so i'm glad you pointed that out because we do have a built in stand with a handle and the speakers on the back and they do a drop test and a dryer test so we have a big flight of steps they take the device and toss it down the flight of steps they drop it from the second floor because we have a second floor kind of an opening and probably i would say probably the things that the really give the most like on switches these connections or on the battery chargers the device can be a lot sturdier that's incredibly awesome  being able to provide somebody that has this these abilities is amazing and the days prior they were kind of helpless were there put in special schools special places people are amazing and there are a lot of videos on you tube if you type in p r c access or you type in augmentative communication on youtube you will see different companies different individuals we have people who they have older devices that had