Todd Beamer graduates, among others, create apps for stroke survivors

Published 9:30 am Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Dee Rogers’ dad can’t say his wife’s name, but he can recite his children’s.

“With aphasia, practicing is the main therapy,” she said.

In November, the Rogers family was hit with an unexpected tragedy when Dee Rogers’ father had a stroke.

According to the National Aphasia Association, 25-40 percent of stroke survivors acquire aphasia, which is a “communication disorder that impairs a person’s ability to process language, but does not affect intelligence.”

“When my dad was in the hospital, he really couldn’t even say ‘yes,'” she said. “He could say ‘yes,’ but sometimes he meant ‘no,’ so it was just… nothing was working for him.”

Her father would become frustrated because “his mind was and is totally there,” Dee Rogers said.

But then the family discovered that pictures resonated with him. He could point to what he needed on a chart that depicted about 40 tiny pictures, which the hospital staff provided.

Still, the pictures were vague and the amount of them overwhelmed him.

Dee Rogers’ daughter, Maddie Rogers, who’s studying computer science at the Colorado School of Mines, and her husband, who works at a software company in Seattle, scoured Apple’s App store for apps that would help, but the few out there were either $50 or were too complicated.

“So my dad and I, we decided… maybe we’ll just make an app for him to use that’s easier – that can help him,” Maddie Rogers said. “We found a few other people my age in computer science and we decided to make the app.”

Maddie Rogers, a 2015 Todd Beamer High School graduate, teamed up with students who are children of her father’s coworkers and have similar interests in computer science. The initial team consisted of Maddie Rogers; Gary Yost III, a 2015 Stadium High School graduate; Maddy Fletcher, a 2014 graduate of Aviation High School; and Nathan Wacker, who will be a Mercer Island High School senior in September.

They then added Kevin Lee, a 2016 Todd Beamer graduate, because Yost and Maddie Rogers worked with him during their time at Northwest Nuclear Consortium and “knew his work ethic was stellar.”

“I was pretty excited because I’m doing computer science in college next year, and I thought it would be a good experience before I go off to college,” said Lee, who will attend the University of Washington in the fall.

The Northwest Nuclear Consortium is an “independent educational laboratory in Federal Way” with a mission to “educate high school students and the community about about nuclear technologies in energy and medicine,” according to their website (lobby.nwnc.us.com).

In January, Maddie Rogers’ dad created lessons and tutorials for the kids to work on to learn programming while the majority were away at college. They also started a business called Sharp Synaptics, LLC. When they came home from college for summer break, they got to work.

Hospital Stay: Stroke

Maddie Rogers and Yost worked on the first app, which they called “Hospital Stay: Stroke.”

“The first one was a lot harder than the second one,” Maddie Rogers said. “The first app, the main idea is it’s used when the person is in the hospital and they just need to communicate their basic needs.”

“Hospital Stay: Stroke” greets a user with a screen showing six images that can communicate “yes,” “no,” that they’re in pain, that they need help rolling over in bed, that they need to use the restroom or that they need hygiene help.

The app uses large icons that, once pressed, has the app speak a command and highlight the needed icon for three seconds. Usage of the app is fairly straightforward, although stroke survivors may need an explanation by their caregiver to get started.

“Hospital Stay: Stroke” is available for 99 cents and is compatible with iPhones and iPads.

Maddie Rogers said she showed her grandfather their first app and was surprised when he picked German as the language to practice on.

“We have a few languages that you can select on it, and he was speaking in the German words,” she said. “I thought that was really funny, and he was smiling the whole time and [was] able to say the words and stuff when he was clicking on them.”

Her grandfather also tested out the Japanese version of the app, Dee Rogers added, laughing.

“It’s a super shock at first, and then you just kind of deal with it,” she said.” And you’re thankful they’re still there and, you know, their mind’s still there – they just can’t talk.”

Dee Rogers, fighting back tears, said she can see how proud her father is of her daughter, and it makes her proud to see “what a great kid she’s grown into.”

When the first app was being created, Lee joined the team and got to work on creating their company’s website, www.sharpsynaptics.com.

After Apple accepted it in late June, the team got to work on creating two other apps.

Aphasia Therapy

In a “girls against boys” manner, Maddie Rogers and Fletcher began work on a second app designed to re-learn names of places, pictures, objects – anything, really – because it personalizes practice.

“You can take a picture of any object,” Maddie Rogers said. “Like, you can take a picture of my mom and type in a name and have whoever’s taking care of the patient record audio of them saying ‘mom.’ And then you’ll have a long list of different images you can take pictures of and you can practice all of those.”

If the user gets the answer correct, they can move on to the next image. If they get it wrong, they can practice again. There are also hints that explain the first letter of the person, place or thing in the object.

“Aphasia Therapy” is $4.99 in the App Store and is much less expensive than similar products. It was released Aug. 6.

Speak For Me

Yost, Wacker and Lee are still working on “Speak For Me,” an app that takes the ideas from the first and second app and expands their use for communication.

Speak For Me allows users to take their own photos and link their own recordings to those photos so that when a stroke survivor presses the photo, the audio will begin. The user can then communicate with others in a more detailed way than what the first app presented.

“Once you get home from the hospital you’re going to need to say, ‘Hey, I want a sandwich,’ or ‘I want this,’ or ‘I have to go to the doctor,'” Dee Rogers said. “It’s more detailed.”

Wacker said he contributed to the design of the app, has done some translations for different languages, and has helped write code.

“This is purely for getting through your day,” Wacker said, noting a use for the app would be to have a picture of a restaurant with audio indicating the user wants to go to that restaurant.

Wacker said he taught himself how to code but plans to take an AP computer science class in the next school year.

Lee said he and his teammates are planning to finish “Speak For Me” on Friday and hope to submit it to the App Store next week. It, too, will be $4.99.

“I personally don’t have any family members [that have had a stroke], but I imagine how hard it is to communicate,” Lee said. “This app will really benefit those victims of stroke.”

While Lee isn’t sure if he wants to continue to put his coding skills toward the medical field as a career, he said he wants his work to help people.

“I want to go to Silicon Valley and work in a start-up or a big technology company like Google or Intel,” he said.

As for the future of Sharp Synaptics, LLC?

“We hope to keep enhancing these to make them more usable, and I could see these apps being useful to not only stroke patients, but maybe little kids that want to practice saying stuff or people that have speaking disabilities,” Maddie Rogers said, adding that feedback and app reviews are welcomed.

To learn more about Sharp Synaptics apps, visit www.sharpsynaptics.com.