In what may bring some hope to the disabled, two graduates of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur are ready with a technology which will enable a large section of the disabled community including autism and cerebral palsy patients to communicate with the rest of the world.

Their product, Sanyog, is an IT tool-suite with three interfaces that enable those suffering from serious speech impairment and neuro-motor disorders use computers to communicate with others. The interfaces are speech enabled and support Indian regional language.

Since these patients can not use the regular keyboard, the IIT team has also come out with a number of special input devices that can be operated by the twitch of a hand or by moving the legs and even with the lips. With these switches, these patients can use icons, images and follow simple grammatical instructions like tense, number and gender for writing and in turn communicating with the rest of the world. India currently has an estimated 1.5 million cerebral palsy and 1.7 million autistic patients.

“Of course the input will be slower than ours, but at least they will be able to communicate, which they can not at the moment,” Soumyajit Dey, who is doing his PhD on computer architecture at the IIT told Deccan Herald.

The technology has received accolades from Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy in Kolkata, National Institute of Mental Health in Hyderabad and the Spastic Society of N India. The Spastic Society of Karnataka has also evinced interest in adopting the technology in its Bangalore centre.