Ajit Narayanan AVAZ an alternate communication system for Disabled

Invention Labs was founded by Ajit Narayanan, an alumnus of IIT Madras. Ajit is the Chairman and Managing Director of Invention Labs. He worked with American Megatrends Inc. in Fremont, California before returning to India to found Invention Labs. Ajit has 17 patents pending with the USPTO, 1 PCT application, and 3 Indian patent applications. His areas of interest include natural language processing, embedded systems design, microprocessors and microcontrollers, computer languages and technical documentation. Ajit holds a B.Tech and M.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, where he was awarded the Motorola Prize and the Institute Blues for his academic and extra-curricular activities.

Avaz:

India's first Augmentative and Alternative Communication device for children with disabilities. This device works by generating speech from limited muscle movements like that from the head or hand, and can be used people with speech disorders such ascerebral palsy, autism, mental retardation, and aphasia.He is a TR35 awardee (2011) and an awardee of the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities by the President of India (2010).

There are an estimated 10 million people in India who suffer from speech impediments. They may not have speech but they have a lot to say. And they can benefit from Narayanan's device. AVAZ is a communication device for people with speech disorders such as cerebral palsy, autism, mental retardation, and aphasia.

Avaz works by converting limited muscle movements, such as head or finger movements, into speech. His invention broadly falls under the category of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) technologies.

Though speech generating devices are effective, most AAC devices aren't within the reach of the speech-impaired persons in the developing world and they mostly generate speech in English. This is another deterrent which has prevented these devices from becoming as popular in the developing world.

"Narayanan's innovation lies in bringing down the cost of the device to one-tenth of the price of similar devices, making it affordable to a wide swath of the Indian disabled population, and making it available in Indian languages," says N Suresh, Editor of Technology Review India who led the TR35 initiative in India for the second year in a row.