How New Tech Is Boosting Computer-Operated Communication
“Today, education is based on computers,” Vega says. “If a person cannot operate a computer, they cannot access the same resources as somebody who can.”
After Vega began to stutter as a child, he became interested in computer keyboards’ capacity to enable expression, something he later realized might be beneficial for people whose ability to speak or move is impaired.
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He began working on the design for MouthPad after finishing graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a friend he’d met at University of California, Berkeley.
After forming Augmental, MouthPad’s parent company, the co-creators built a prototype. The company is now working to raise capital so that it can scale the product’s user base up from fewer than 10 people to possibly 1,000 in the next two or three years, according to Vega.