Breaking Badge: Augmenting Communication with Wearable AAC Smartbadges and Displays

People living with complex communication needs employ multimodal pathways to communicate including: limited speech, paralinguistics, non-verbal communication and leveraging low-tech devices. However, most augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions undermine end-users’ agency by obstructing these intuitive communication pathways. In this paper, we collaborate with 19 people living with the language impairment aphasia exploring contextual communication challenges, before low-fidelity prototyping and wireframing wearable AAC displays. These activities culminated in two low-input wearable AAC prototypes that instead, scaffold users’ pre-existing communication abilities. Firstly, the InkTalker is a low-power and affordable eInk AAC smartbadge designed to discreetly reveal invisible disabilities and usable as a communication prop. Secondly, WalkieTalkie is a scalable AAC app that converts smartphones into a feature-rich public display operable via multimodal input/outputs. We offer results from communication interactions with both devices, discussions and feedback responses. Participants used both AAC devices to interdependently socialise with others and augment pre-existing communication abilities.