TalkBox is a low-cost Speech Generating Device (SGD) that helps individuals communicate and engage in social interactions. With the collaboration of the Lassonde Professor Melanie Baljko and Devices 4 Disabilities we were  able to create this wonderful device. We are currently still creating them and taking innovating ideas about other devices. Join us and become an innovator in your community!

The Talkbox project has several goals:

• Empowerment: to provide a low-cost open-source, open-hardware SGD and other assistive technologies to the community, so that those who need such devices can more easily obtain them.  To empower more individuals who have disabilities be makers themselves. To create an ecosystem of making that provides employment opportunities for high schoolstudents who have developmental disabilities.

• Community: to build a community of knowledge and practice around maker approaches to assistive technologies. This includes create rich experiential learning experiences for undergraduate students in the Lassonde School of Engineering andother undergraduate programs.

• Innovation: to make use of new modes of academic-community collaboration. To provide a maker-based mode in the ecology of technology distribution for SGDs and other assistive technologies (which includes the mode provided by Ontario’s Assistive Devices Program). To enrich the body of scholarship that is concerned with the field of Assistive Technology.  To mobilize knowledge outputs from academic research into active use in the community.

The TalkBox won the top prize at the Toronto Mini Maker Faire!

http://yfile.news.yorku.ca/2014/12/09/lassonde-team-wins-top-prize-at-toronto-mini-maker-faire/