The topic of this proposal is the design of an environmental control system for the more than two million individuals in the United States whose physical and/or mental impairments are so severe that they are unable to interact with the environment in a normal and effective manner. A two-year collaborative research effort between the Bioengineering Program at the National Headquarters of the Association for the Bioengineering Program at the National Headquarters of the Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC) and Scott Instruments has demonstrated that a woman with profound mental retardation, severe physical handicaps, and almost completely unintelligible vocalizations could learn to voice activate a computer for the purposes of controlling various electrical devices in her environment. It was concluded from the study that speech recognition and activation of a computer by a person with severe multihandicaps is an appropriate use of technology which can be a positive intervention and life enhancer (Brown, 1985). Although highly successful, this initial research effort uncovered a number of problems with the system that was developed (Brown, Cavalier, and Tipton, 1986B). The current proposal addresses these problems through the use of current state-of-the-art speech recognition technology, an object- oriented user interface for system setup, and an automated training procedure for the user.
