Supporting Personal Narrative Elicitation: Identifying Discrete Moment of Interest Event Cues Within Digital Video Footage

Sharing one’s personal narrative plays a crucial role in the development of personal identity, interpersonal bonding, and mastery of language. However, for people with CCN who rely upon current AAC methods, access to spontaneous discourse is often restricted, impacting on the development of this key developmental mechanism. Ergonomic challenges in the interface design of aided communication devices often result in low output speeds not conducive to the flow of natural conversation. Therefore people who use AAC are often confined to simple transactional utterances, and are typically not afforded the enriching opportunity to hone their pragmatic communication skills, to share their personal experiences, and to learn from the experiences of others - potentially a socially isolating deficit, with long-term implications. Accordingly, a small-scale study was designed to evaluate a proposed solution to part of this problem by utilising video to capture and manually mark for retrieval key moments throughout each participant’s day. The aim of this project was to assess the feasibility of harnessing digital video as a technical tool to assist people without functional speech to share personal experiences. This study took the form of an ethnographic investigation, deploying qualitative research techniques to glean insights into the feasibility of the proposed system. The results were promising, and based upon these, it is hoped research into a fully developed prototype, with automated elements, may be designed in follow up projects.