Name Abdullah Al Mahmud
Advisors Jean-Bernard Martens
Website project page

An important part of our personal life is being able to share with others different stories. In a regular family gathering, when meeting friends, during coffee break at work, people share all kinds of stories and events that have happened to them or to others. In other words storytelling enables people to share and reflect on their own or other people’s life experience. When a person, due to injury or disease, looses or become limited in his/her ability to use language (for example, because of aphasia) or has difficulties with recalling past events (for example, because of Alzheimer disease) she or he also looses the ability to share stories, which can in turn lead to increased social isolation. The goal of the project is to design, build and test prototypes of storytelling tools for aphasic persons. The main research question addressed in this proposal is whether or not technology can help to break (reduce) the social isolation of people with aphasia and other kinds of communication disorder by supporting story collecting, building and expressing. A research-through-design approach is adopted within the project. This means that new ways of interaction with digital media for aphasic persons are explored and ultimately created within operational prototypes.