Throughout her career after contracting polio Ann Armstrong relied on machines to stay alive (the “iron lung” being one example) and on machines to help her communicate and write. In her book Ann writes, while commenting on astronauts:
“ Like them I lived a restricted life in a tiny space and depended totally on machinery for my communications and air supply” p 216
One important example was the the computer aided system named D.O.R.I.S which was developed in 1985.
Here are two accounts of this system:
“Imagine being constrained to staying in bed – and no electronic helpers like smart phones or tablets around to keep you connected to the world. The only thing you can move is your right foot – so the only thing to send messages was to dictate them to some other person. This was the situation of writer Doris Page for 30 years after she got infected with Polio!
Mrs. Page was a former Wren – a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service – so she knew Morse code. In 1982 Dr. Ian Walker and Martin Trump started and Alex Blok then continued working on a small setup to let Mrs. Page write code herself again: A four button “controller” for her foot was designed to enter Morse “dots” and “dashes”, as well as “delete” and “do it” commands. This was connected to a BBC Micro computer equiped with a Morse handling routine, a word processor, and a speech synthesizer feedback module. The system was called, after her namesake, D.O.R.I.S. “DIGITAL OPERATION of REHABILITATION and INDEPENDENCE SYSTEM” [1]. The system gathered some press and it was used by Mrs. Page for a number of years to make her life a little bit easier.
Using D.O.R.I.S. she wrote a book, “Breath of Life”, under her pen name of “Ann Armstrong”, that was even serialized on BBC radio. And she was founding editor of “The Responaut”, a magazine by and for people living with assisted respiration.
The 6502 has also been successful in even much less prominent places helping people even to survive – a “high volume” application of the 6502 is pacemakers and embedded heart defibrillators [2].”
[1] http://www.tecterran.com/doris
[2] http://65xx.com/support/contact-us/about-us/
Extract taken from https://plus.google.com/108984290462000253857/posts/2CW5qe2BLRG
The second account is taken from the website of the named designer Alex Blok:
D.O.R.I.S.
[D]igital [O]operation of [R]ehabilitation + [I]ndependence [S]ystem (1984)
A morse code word processor operated using a four button controller. Real time feedback was provided by an easy to comprehend speech synthesizer providing voice feedback as each character is entered.
SPECIFICATION
RPS Speech Synthesizer
4 button controller
Canon Bubble jet Printer
TEAM
Alex Blok
Software design and development
Micro Consultants
Initial Morse Code algorithm
