At the end of my sophomore year, I read one CHI paper by chance: "Blocks4All: overcoming accessibility barriers to blocks programming for children with visual impairments." Written by Milne and her colleagues, this paper explores the methods of overcoming accessibility issues in existing block-based programming tools. I was super intrigued by how HCI researchers try to understand user groups and reflect design implications into an artifact.

Surprisingly, at that moment my supervisor asked if I'm willing to lead a project for developing an AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) application. Definitely I said yes, because I found it really difficult to take part in any research project as an undergrad without any previous research experience then. From then, I spent almost every night developing an iOS app, while simultaneously conducting user studies, reading relevant papers, and even designing! Literally everything was new: from being funded for a research to getting an approval from IRB for the evaluation! Fortunately, at the moment when I finished my research, we were almost at the deadline of CHI 2020 and submitted our work there, and got accepted with an Honorable Mention Award.

To summarize our paper briefly, we tried not to restrict a stakeholder of AAC to only a child, but also viewed their caregivers very important in the process of child's communication. Based on this research context, we aimed to develop a system that helps them collaborate to drive the best strategies on child's communication. As a result, we developed Talkingboogie, a mobile AAC system for children with developmental disabilities.

Usage flow of TalkingBoogie system

TalkingBoogie system consists of two mobile apps: TalkingBoogie-AAC for caregiver-child communication, and TalkingBoogie-Coach supporting caregiver collaboration.

Keyscreens of TalkingBoogie-AAC

Keyscreens of TalkingBoogie-Coach