Phemi: Software for aphasia (and thus, some epilepsy) to aid online communication

[Mantis]

I hope this thread is okay here, but if a moderator/admin is unsure about that send me a PM or whatnot. I discussed this program over a year ago when I last visited. It's still a beta version (and an early beta at best) but it should be stable enough to use. I originally started making it for my temporal lobe epilepsy. It causes me (amongst other seizures/tonic-clonics) to sometimes completely forget what I'm about to say, and temporarily lose the comprehension to come up with a response to a friend.

While a solution isn't so easy in verbal communication, it's also a problem when talking online. Either way, to some you might appear rude if you abruptly stop communicating or hang up during a phone call because you know the alternative would be worse. I wrote Phemi as a solution to that when talking online. It has a small database (I might expand on that) of auto-responses for cases when you can't reply to people because of aphasia. All you do is click the program from the system tray (bottom-right of screen), click a button and the auto-response is copied. Then you just paste it into Facebook/Skype or your other chat program and send.

You can tell I haven't made many changes in a while since that screenshot is over a year old! However, it should be very operational, but I'm releasing this beta in case anyone finds issues I'm not aware of. So keep in mind it is an incomplete program, but hopefully it might really help someone. As you can see, I added a few options for different scenarios. If you're talking with someone who knows about your E/aphasia you can use the illness button. If it's someone who doesn't know you can send a general goodbye or a goodnight message. There are also two spaces for your own messages.

Oh yeah, there's a picture icon to switch to other funky backgrounds. :lol:


Known issues

• The program is supposed to save your custom messages and I can't remember if that works yet, but it's supposed to keep running so this shouldn't matter so much
• I intended to add colour coding for the custom messages to combat the issue of not remembering what they are (so people could associate a message with a colour)—this doesn't work at all yet!
• The program actively eats a few percentage of CPU for most people which is quite a big issue I will try to resolve, but you should let me know if this causes problems anyway
• Phemi automatically minimises to the system tray if you click off it or move the mouse cursor away for around five seconds, but in a few rare circumstances it's not been possible to open it up again, so let me know if that happens
• Sometimes when you close the program there is still a space in the system tray where the icon used to be, but hovering your mouse cursor over that will instantly fix it

Like I said, in a few cases it wasn't possible to close it through its interface. (This problem was very rare for me though.) If that happens you'll need to close it through the task manager, which can be accessed by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del.

Thanks very much if you decide to give it a try. I've generally been feeling crappy over the past year which is a reason I put it on the backburner, but also I wasn't sure how many people would use it. Constructive criticism is welcome and suggestions.

Phemi 0.8 Beta
(You'll need to extract the program from this zip file. In most versions of Windows this is as simple as just dragging it out of the zip "folder". I don't plan to make an installer until the program is in a complete form.)

"Phemi" is apparently Greek for "I speak". Thanks very much to Matthew74 for the name!

 

[Nakamova]

This sounds cool Mantis. I'm not a cellphone person and I don't get aphasia, so I can't take advantage your hard work, but I hope others can.

 

[Mantis]

Oh, it's not a phone app. It's for Windows computers to use for Facebook, Skype, or other kinds of text chat. Thanks anyway. When I started making it, it was for what I thought was some strange kinds of partial seizures I have which involve not being able to talk (or doing so in a very confused way), depersonalisation so I feel disconnected from what's around me, and in the worse scenarios looking like a drunken fool around those who don't know about my E. :lol:

It was only when somebody here mentioned the word I realised the first problem was symptoms of aphasia. Didn't even know what it is. I think there's a chance other people with epilepsy here have aphasia symptoms without knowing the condition has a name.

 

[Nakamova]

Oh, it's not a phone app.

Shows you what a non-techie I am.
I'm a mac person so I'm still off the potential user list.

 

[Lisa36]

I do have to say this is a very clever idea. As someone that has had aphasic simple partials on a pretty regular basis for several years, it is always handy to have a way to convey to an observer the situation since access to specific words during an aphasic seizure is greatly limited, and interpretation of their words is nil.