T. Gross et al. (Eds.): INTERACT 2009, Part I, LNCS 5726, pp. 81–84, 2009. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009 ‘I Have Something to Say’: Supporting Aphasics for Organizing and Sharing Personal Experiences by Photos Abdullah Al Mahmud and Jean-Bernard Martens Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands {a.al-mahmud,j.b.o.s.martens}@tue.nl Abstract. When a person, due to brain injury or other disease, suffers in his or her ability to speak, it becomes inherently cumbersome to share needs, emotions, and experiences through personal stories and social interaction. We report on our early design exploration to share everyday experiences by photos for people having expressive aphasia. We also introduce the concept of a multimodal narrative template to help persons with aphasia to reconstruct their experiences and hence promote face-to-face communication and social interaction from everyday activities. Keywords: Aphasia, Sharing experiences, Contextual interview. 1 Introduction Much of our social life consists of sharing daily stories with other people. However, sharing personal stories can be extremely difficult for people with limited verbal ability, such as those suffering from expressive aphasia. As a result, aphasia often leads to increased social isolation and possibly to depression. Enabling persons with aphasia to share their daily experiences will help them to become more socially active and to re-engage with their preferred life style. Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder that is caused by brain injury or trauma. Aphasia affects language comprehension and generation [4], such that people’s ability to express themselves verbally suffers. Speech Generating Devices (SGD) such as TouchSpeak [6] are widely used in aphasia therapy as well as during the post-therapy period though there are various limitations of SGDs such as (a) They contain isolated symbols whose meanings have to be learned and need to retrieve phrases or words to construct meaning which supports very simple stories. Therefore, these activities pose cognitive challenges for the users. (b) SGDs support needs-based interaction for functional communication. They lack the support for sharing experiences based on real-life events, which are key aspects to social interaction. Sharing experiences from real-life events require evidence captured in different forms such as photos. Photographs have several functions such as preserving memories about the past, narrating and organizing everyday experiences, and communicating and building social relations [3]. Photography has been proposed within ‘Aphasia Talks’ [5] as a way of facilitating self-expression in persons with aphasia for reintegration, improving socialization and allowing recreation. The issue of how people with special needs can be empowered to use photos to share experience