A family member had a stroke a few years back and now has expressive aphasia. She understands what is said to her, is cognitive of what is going on, but cannot express herself. She is able to respond to yes/no questions (do you want to go shopping? are you looking for your earrings?) She is not, however, able to read (English is not her native language and she hasn't read Hindi for decades.)

I am the technologist in the family, and I intend to come up with something to help us communicate. The idea is to have some sort of picture book where she can point to what she wants.

My first question: does some sort of assistive technology for people with expressive aphasia already exist? These can be hardware or software devices?

If not, then such a software doesn't seem difficult to write. My initial thought is to have an interface with pictures - maybe separated by category (food, shopping) - where she can point to an individual picture to indicate what she needs. We could easily add more items with such a software, and we could have an interface where she (or we) could "flip pages".

Which suggests that the best solution would use a touch screen rather than a mouse. It would be really difficult to train her to aim a mouse or find keys on a keyboard.

We're thinking of maybe getting a tablet and writing some basic software. But tablets computers are expensive and fragile - I'm not sure if it would be able to stand spills or being knocked about in a nursing home.

So my next question: what kind of tablet-like devices are out there which I can program on? I don't know anything about hardware, but if there is something then we could special-order it. What would be safe and durable for such a project? We could do something on an iPod or cell phone, but I feel like that interface would be too small.

Finally, does anyone here have experience with this kind of assistive technology? Things I might not anticipate when designing such a system?

edit

I've added a (pretty hefty!) bounty. I'd kinda like to open this question up to any suggestions, comments, and experiences that people might have. This is a pretty real and important project, so while we will (are working on) a solution, any insights would be particularly helpful.

Right now the plan is to mount a screen in her room. We'll either teach her to use a trackball or use a touch-screen panel, after seeing what she is able to use with a simple prototype. Then software akin to an old "hypercard" deck:

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|   --------------          --------------                     |
|   |  Clothes   |          |    Food    |      ...            |       
|   --------------          --------------                     |
|                                                              |
|    Pic of item 1     Pic of item 2     Pic of item  3        |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|    Pic of item 4     Pic of item 5     Pic of item  6        |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|  <-Back                                       Next->         |
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