Toward a Full Integration of the Arabic Language into ‘Intel ACAT’ Assitive Platform

Abstract

Background:
Assisting people with severe physical limitations with information technology has been an active area of research in recent years. Many researchers’ efforts are built on assistive devices which are often used to offset the impact of the resulted physical impairments.
The Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) is the widely known project in this area. After being released as open source, the developers’ community helped to integrate many languages such as French and Spanich. However, many languages are still messing and to the best of our knowledge, the Arabic-speaking users still can not use the platform as no significant effort to integrate the Arabic language have been previously undertaken.
Methods:
This paper firstly, provides an overview on ACAT; the specifically-developed platform by Intel Labs for Dr. Stephen Hawking. Besides, it describes the ways in which ACAT may be used to enhance the capacity to take part in fundamental and instrumental activities of every day living and upgrade one's autonomy in general.
Secondly, we outline our contributions in integrating the Arabic language into the keyboard, the intelligent predictive text engine and all interfaces of this unique and highly configurable system.
Results:
Our integration evolved after resolving many issues and we succeeded in integrating the Arabic language in interfaces, keyboard and word prediction engine. Most of other ACAT features (Facial gesture recognition, Mouse Navigation., etc) are functional.

Conclusion:
This work is a step forward to make the intel ACAT platform completely available in Arabic language. Therefore, Arabic-speaking patient can now get the benefits from this platform and are able to perform common tasks such as documents editing and management, Web surfing, writing emails and above all, communicating with others easily.
The Arabic Text-to-speech engine integration is planned for future works .