Dad Develops App to Talk with Autistic Children
Whether looking for a jobor navigating through life, communication skills are essential. Despite highlevels of intelligence people with autism find these skills are extremelydifficult to understand let alone master.
This can be particularly frustrating for the people who love and care forthem. Each family develops their own system of understanding cues andalternatives to traditional conversation.Joe Hill, an insurance salesman fromVirginia, found it was easy to bond with his 2 autistic sons over a game ofAngry Birds. His oldest son Deacon would explore the game for hours.“He wassaying, ‘birds, birds,’ and asking for it by name, which is a big deal becausehe doesn’t say much,” Hill said. “I hadn’t seen him interact with toys likethat at all. So I knew there was hope. I knew there’s something in his mindthat could be unlocked.”He wondered if he could take the concept of a phonegame and turn it into a way to talk to his children and the concept forAeir Talk was born. Hill’s idea took thetraditional use of flash cards to teach communication and added a digitaltwist.“I just really wanted something that was affordable and was also qualitywork,” Hill said. “There were a lot of apps that did a lot of different things,but I really wanted a one-stop shop for people who had kids with autism.”Through repetition and recognition children interact with sentence structurehands on. Parents add their own images, labels and voice recording to createcards in categories like nouns and verbs. Children touch, drag and drop thecards into a staging area to create sentences.Hill’s idea was great. He’d metwith doctors, parents and investors who all agreed so he quit his job andfocused full time on developing the app with We Are Titans, a Norfolk-based Weband mobile software development company. Unfortunately shortly after startingthe funding fell through and Hill opted to pay his mortgage instead of movingforward with the project and he took a job scrubbing toilets at a hotel.We AreTitans thought the project was too important to stall. Instead of letting itsit on the shelf they formed a partnership with Hill and went ahead withdeveloping Aeir Talk.“The type of company that we have, people call us everyday with ideas – they have something they call the next Facebook, or somethingrevolutionary,” said Zack Miller of We Are Titans. “But not every day do wehear something like this.”Since launching the app, Hill has heard praises fromparents and professionals across the board. The great thing is that the appisn’t specific to autistic children. All kids with developing language skillscan benefit from playtime with this iTool. By Heather Fairchild – Heather is a multimedia developer withexperience in web, film, photography and animation as well as traditional finearts like painting and sculpting. In addition to writing for Beyond.com, she is co-founder of a design andpromotion company. Heather’s spare time consists of making puppets, teachingSunday School, building Legos and doing science experiments with herchildren.
