Welcome to the home page for the Symbo Project.
The project is funded by the University of Tromsø, Department of Computer Science.
The research presented on this web-site is part of the The Medical informatics & telemedicine (MI&T) group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø.
Project Summary
For a person who cannot read or write, text-based e-mail is useless. In this group, we find small children and people with read/write disabilities. In the Symbo project, our goal has been to open up the possibilities of electronic communication to such a user group. Our user group comprises children who are between four and eight years old. Children at this age like to tell stories, and love to draw pictures. In addition, parents and teachers find it vital that children learn to express themselves both visually and through using sound. An electronic communication tool will enable them to explore such forms.
To enable communication between these children, we need a visual language. Even though several visual languages exist, they all suffer from one major shortcoming, complexity. Thus, the Symbo project has developed its own language called SymboL, short for “Symbolic Language”. It consists of around one hundred visual symbols that the user can freely combine when constructing their message. The language does not have any grammatical rules or structure, and although the symbols officially will only have a single word associated with them, they can be used in several different types of settings.
It is obvious from the outset that it would not be possible to communicate any lengthy or considerable content using SymboL. Nevertheless, there’s a great chance that the users who are presented with a new possibility to reach others may not share this view, and find the communication to be both valuable and significant. We also see clear opportunities to develop the language into a more structured form without losing the ease-of-use characteristic in the future. SymboL has been tested through a special designed e-mail system.
Figure 1. Symbo ver. 1.0
Project goals
This project will try to solve the following problems:
- How to make the best GUI (Graphical user interface) for kids, i.e., so they easily can understand the application. There are several problems we need to face when designing applications for kids. Since we are targeting children in ages 4-8 years, we need to take in consideration that most of them not yet know how to read and write their native language.
- How we can convert a written message to a symbol message, and vice versa. With this function, we will not be dependent on using the specially designed e-mail application when reading messages or creating new messages.
- The presentation of a symbolic library, in such a way that it is easy and fast to find symbols when creating new messages. If the symbolic library for some reason needs to be modified or replaced, this should not inflict any drastic changes in the structure of the library.
In 2003 we started to merge the work with symbols for children with the our work on patient diaries. Our goal is to construct a symbol-based patient diary for children that cannot read or write.
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Contact Information
- Contact person
- Professor Gunnar Hartvigsen
- Telephone
- +47 776 44049
- Mobile phone
- +47 90 65 77 85
- Telephone, secretary
- +47 776 44056
- FAX
- +47 776 44580
- Postal address
- Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø,
N-9037 Tromsø, Norway - Electronic mail
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