Introduction of HeartyPresenter

HeartyPresenter is a presentation system for people with severe disabilities. Speech synthesis is used in conjunction with PowerPoint operations.

Motivation for Development

Hajime Takano, who is planning this system, is a patient with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), which started in early 2013 and is already the most severely disabled person requiring 24-hour care.

Nevertheless, He has been trying to find a way not to lose his connection to society, to continue communicating, and to make presentations, among other things.

There are many welfare devices for the severely disabled, and he has now established a gaze input environment and use a computer with almost no difficulty. This allows him to operate PowerPoint even though he can barely move his hands. He can also speak using the text-to-speech function.

However, there was no way to do these two things at the same time.

To solve this problem, HeartyPresenter was developed.

Background of Development

Early on, his dysarthria developed and by the spring of 2015 he was having difficulty speaking in public. He began using a computer speech synthesizer to converse, and the idea came to him that he could use this to make presentations.

The concept took shape in the summer of 2017. He then began selecting developers and started development in December.

An alpha version was completed at the beginning of February, and between the end of February and the end of March, he tried it out in four lectures. They are now developing a beta version that reflects the findings from that trial.

This website is operated for the purpose of having users try out the beta version under development and give us feedback.

About the β version

The β version is still under development and will be updated as needed based on user feedback. They will also continue to revise the user manual.

Distribution is limited to registered users for this reason.

Please click here and read it for more details.

Ackknoledgement

This system has been supported by  the cloud funding site ReadyFor

We would like to thank all of our supporters.

A list of all our supporters is here.