Saskatoon student invents deaf blind communication device

WATCH: A Saskatoon high school student is gaining national attention for his invention that helps deaf blind people communicate with others.

A Saskatoon high school student’s invention, TouchTalk, is helping deaf blind people communicate at a fraction of the cost of current market solutions.

After his grandfather began losing his hearing, and fearing his sight may be next, then grade 11 student Joti Gokaraju decided to find a way to help the deaf blind community communicate.

“I realized there were 160 million people just like him who couldn’t communicate with their families,” said Gokaraju, now a grade 12 student at Walter Murray Collegiate. “And they had to rely on very expensive or inaccessible technology. And I had the tools to make a difference, so I wanted to do that.”

As part of the Saskatoon Public Schools Academically Gifted Education (SAGE) program, Gokaraju designed an app in computer science class that would translate voice input into Braille characters.

Then he took rudimentary parts and built the physical box that takes the braille text from the app and allows the user to read Braille.

But Gokaraju learned a valuable lesson while building the hardware.

“If you just design software all at the start and then you just built the hardware, It’s very unlikely they’re going to work together,” he said. “So when I was building the hardware, I had to go through about six different versions or seven different prototypes. And along with that, I had to revise my code multiple times.”

The main benefit, he says, is that it’s low cost to make.

“The alternatives cost around five thousand dollars, this is one hundred dollars which is about fiver per cent of the cost,” said Gokaraju. “And that makes it really affordable, especially since most deaf blind people are in more impoverished countries. So this makes it more accessible to the global population.”

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While students in the SAGE program have gone on to do attend universities like MIT or Harvard with promising careers in major companies, teachers say a story like Gokaraju’s is rare.

“I think Joti is the first time that we’ve ever had a candidate develop something, take it all the way to the national level and then look to implement it in the marketplace to really help people,” said Lisa Kalesnikoff, teacher at Walter Murray Collegiate. “So he’s kind of a standout out of all of the 15 years I’ve taught in the SAGE program.”

His work on the TouchTalk caught the attention of the National Science Fair and the Rideau Hall Foundation where he was given an Ingenious+ award in Ottawa last week.

But as nice as the award felt, Gokaraju valued the guidance from peers and business leaders to turn his idea into an actual business enterprise.

“They had people in the venture capital industry who were there who provided advice on how to fund your projects,” he said. “People talked about how to get patents, so I would say it was a lot more than just an award.”

Nearing his grade 12 graduation, Gokaraju also met some of his future professors at the University of Toronto and its “incubator lab.”

“I’m probably going to continue working on it there, and hopefully by the time I graduate, I’ll have a fully functioning prototype that can actually be on market shelves.”

Kalesnikoff says as a teacher, she’s constantly surprised and amazed by the ideas of students.

“Students will create anything,” she said. “You never really learn to expect anything, they just surprise you. But the great thing about Joti’s work is that he did all the research, he resourced everything out, his project is completely independent. And all we could do from sort of a school perspective is support him and his ideas.”

Meanwhile, Gokaraju says he’s thankful for the support from local partners like the Canadian Deaf Blind Association, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) and the Saskatoon Public Schools Alternative Format Library.

“I’m lucky enough to be born in a country that really values innovation, born in a city that helps youth achieve their dreams, and go to a school where kids are allowed to basically do anything and have teachers who are willing to support that dream,” he said.