Comeback

Now the Emoji can be used to help Aphasia sufferers!

Emoji can be a means of communicating for special needs. It is this idea that inspires an application called Wemogee. Developed by Samsung Italia in collaboration with Francesca Polini's speech therapist, Wemogee utilizes an ideogram to help aphasia sufferers, which are language processing disorders, difficult to read, write, or speak to others.

As quoted from Tech Crunch, Wednesday (4/26/2017), Wemogee replaces phrases or collections of words with a combination of emoji that can be used as an application to send messages or interactions such as face to face.

"Aphasic patients understand emoji because they portray different aspects of emotion. Using gestures, photos and facial expressions, works perfectly in the understanding and production of language," Polini said.

So far, the new Wemogee supports both English and Italian and is available for Android devices on April 28, 2017 and will follow long term loans availability for later versions of iOS. The next developments may focus on other platforms like Windows.

To note, aphasia occurs because the areas of the brain responsible for language processing and speech, are injured. The most common cause of this disorder is stroke. However, aphasia can also occur because of brain tumors, brain injury or neurodegenerative diseases.

Based on the National Aphasia Association of the United States (US), about two million US citizens experience this kind of communication disorder. Each year, the figure increases by about 180,000. The number is growing year by year.

For your info, many aphasia sufferers are used to drawing or using an image card to communicate. Well, Wemogee is designed to make it easier for them to communicate in a faster way. The Wemogee Developer claims its application is the first chat-based emoji app designed to allow aphasia sufferers to communicate. This application has two modes, namely visual and textual.

Aphasia sufferers use emoji prepared to explain more than 140 words grouped in six categories. Wemogee translates the combination of emoji into text form to be understandable to users who do not suffer from aphasia, and translate their responses back into emoji form. What a helpful invention!