iAutism

Josep Martinez is another example of a parent of a child with autism that has developed, with the help of two other people, an application for people with autism. More precisely, they have developed an AAC app based on images.

At first, Baluh seems another typical AAC app, such as Grace (reviewed in iAutism). Baluh is still a very young app, but it includes some features that deserve attention and that other manufacturers would do well to incorporate into their products.

Starting
The first time you run Baluh, you are asked to confirm your language. Then, the app downloads a set of 400 pictograms along with their associated text labels and audio clips. This is a transparent process that may take a while.

After that, Baluh ask some data on the user: name, date of birth, name of parents and siblings, address and telephone. This information is always accessible from the main screen by touching the icon “Who am I”. You can use it to make family information accessible in case the owner of the device gets lost.

Phrases of pictograms
Once all this is done, what the user sees is a screen with a top box and four pictograms on the bottom.

Typical operation implies that the user touches the “My Book” pictogram to access the image book, consisting of categories and subcategories (a total of 2 levels) of pictograms. Each time you select an image, it is added to the top box. When the phrase is completely contructed, you can press the green “Play” button to hear the concatenation of the audio clips associated with each image. The red cross button deletes the last picture (simple tap) or the whole line (double tap).

The top box has space for seven images, more than enough to build image sentences. In vertical orientation, there is space for only three. As we can delve into subcategories, the multi-colored “Baluh” icon on the bottom allows you to return to the main screen at any time. Within each category or subcategory, the images are sorted alphabetically based on their label with some exceptions, such as the pictograms for “I” and “want”, that appear at the beginning.

Three additional images appear on the main screen: “I want” and “Greetings” allow you a direct access to these two categories. And “Who Am I”, as I indicated, allows you to access the user data.

Tools
Logically, Baluh does not end here. The typical image of a gear in a corner allows you to access the configuration menu of the application.

First, you’ll see the categories option, which helps you browse through folders or categories of pictograms. The more than 400 downloaded pictograms are grouped into nine categories: people, actions, adjectives, names, questions/time/prepositions, social/greetings, emotions, school classes and school supplies.

In some cases, there are two levels of categories. In particular, the category of names includes over 200 pictograms divided into 12 subcategories.

The user can browse the categories and select an image that will appear into the top box. This option thus allows access to images that are not commonly used and therefore are not present in “My Book.”

But if you want that an image become part of “My Book,” you have to go to “Edit My Book”. This option is very similar to the previous one. You can browse the categories and subcategories, and check or uncheck each image to indicate whether or not it has to appear in your book. Then, when you are writing phrases and go to “My Book”, only categories and subcategories that have at least a selected image will appear.

You can add new images (pictograms or pictures). To do this, you simply select an image from the image library of the device, give it a text label, select the category (and perhaps the subcategory) where you want to include it and record an audio clip. You can choose one of the nine categories described above plus two special categories: “I want” and “Greetings”. (In fact, “Greetings” and “social” are really the same category).

By selecting the image you have the option to move and scale it, so that in the end what is an selected is an almost squared image. Sound recording is very sparse graphically, but after all it works.

Download pictograms
The feature that has surprised me more and that I think it is quite unusual in apps so cheap is the ability to directly download new pictograms from ARASAAC’s website.

The slightly more than 400 initial pictograms have been chosen by the team of teachers and speech therapists of Paideia Foundation (which includes a special school). It is a good selection that covers many areas of daily life of a person, and it is much more effective than many others that I have found in similar applications, which are usually smaller and focused only in some areas. Of course, apps that cost more than $100 tend to include thousands of pictograms, but Baluh costs only $3.99.

Obviously, each person will need some specific pictograms. There is the option to locate an appropriate image, load it into the device and follow the procedure explained to add an image. But you can also use the downloading option. It asks you a name, sends a real-time search to ARASAAC’s website and shows the image or images that match that name in thumbnail format. You select one of them and Baluh downloads the image and its audio clip. Then, you can finish the rest of the adding images process.

This way, adding images is much easier. Also, every image comes with the associated audio clip –in your language.

In short, ARASAAC (Aragonese Portal for Augmentative and Alternative Communication) is a Spanish portal that includes numerous AAC resources, including a library of over 12,000 pictograms with their corresponding text and audio clips. Images typically have a resolution of 500 x 500 pixels, and text and audio clips are usually in more than 15 languages ​​(English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, …). It is without doubt one of the leading global resources in AAC. All material is supplied according to the Creative Commons license, which implies that there is no cost to the user for using it.

More options
To finish with all the options, you can also look for pictograms through a text search, although the word or words entered must exactly match the label of a pictogram. If you find one, Baluh adds it directly to the top box.

Finally, the help option displays a manual of the application, which even covers how to install it from iTunes if you purchase it from there.

Assessment
Baluh is designed to build phrases, not to select specific images and show them one by one (something commonly known as PECS). But even between this kind of applications, Baluh is somewhat different.

On the one hand, Baluh has two special categories that are shown on the main screen. It also has included a pictogram there for the user data, and allows the user to create a complete customized version of the whole structure of categories by selecting images from among all possible and without having to delete the others. And Baluh includes 400 useful pictograms.

On the other hand, Baluh does not allow the user to create new categories, decide which ones can appear on the main screen or even rearrange the images within a category.

It is therefore a more closed and less flexible app, but also a more “ready to use” one. A new Baluh user can customize a category tree with hundreds of commonly used images in a few minutes, you even add quickly additional pictograms with the option of downloading them from ARASAAC.

So, I think Baluh is a suitable application for users who want to move to a communication based on constructing phrases but do not like the idea of using vast libraries of thousands of images or would like to start fast and easily.

Beyond this, in my opinion Baluh has two strong points, both related to the pictograms. First, the 400 included pictograms far exceeds what one normally can find in applications of this price or even much more expensive. Second, the pictograms downloading feature is simply wonderful.

On the negative side, graphical details are rather sparse in Baluh, and here and there you find things that still need to be polished: the pictograms associated to subcategories has not any special border or any other detail, when you turn the iPad some windows or pictograms are not correctly shown, the manual has some errors, etc.. None of them seems too serious, but certainly the developers should improve Baluh in future versions to compete in the market.

Overall, if the Baluh approach fits your needs, its price is really low and the 400 included pictograms and the downloading feature make Baluh worth to be considered.

-Francesc Sistach

This post is also available in: Spanish