Translator: Tatiana Rozanec Reviewer: Fabiana Lorena Zuccatto
Before I start, I would like you to look
at the following picture and think, for a second,
what you would do
if you met a person
with a similar reaction.
A person with an attack of anger, fury,
or with a strange behavior.
But, what if this person wasn't a stranger?
What if this person was a brother,
a friend, or a grandfather?
Would you react in the same way?
There are more than 11,5 million people in the world
that due to a pathology, a disorder
or because of an accident, they're not able to communicate.
They cannot tell the people they love the most
what they think,
what they feel, what they want each and every time.
This incapacity generates such frustration,
that these people react in this way,
with attacks of fury, anger, or the total opposite,
with the most absolute isolation.
And the rest of us who do not suffer from this
we neglect them, we cut them off
either consciously or unconsciously.
But we do it.
We reject them.
Without realizing that the key to social relations
is communication.
This is what distinguishes us from other animals.
It's our capacity to communicate,
to be social beings.
To communicate is very difficult.
Tell me about it!
Not only is it important what we say
but how we say it.
And it's in this "how" of communication
where the problem lies.
It's because we focus on that.
We focus on the shout of rage,
on the punch in the wall,
on the young person who skips classes.
And it is these imperfections in our social relationships
what lead them to absolute isolation.
Today I would like to introduce you to someone.
It's my uncle. His name is Paco. Paco suffers from schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a pretty serious mental disorder,
which is characterized
by imagining and seeing things that really don't exist.
Paco even invents things which have never happened.
Moreover, due to the strong medications
he has been losing his ability to speak little by little
and this made it really difficult to communicate with him.
An example of this is one of his many ways.
Every day, twice a day,
and at the same time, he goes to the bathroom
and starts to play with water.
At first we accepted it as another ritual.
But the problem was when he got out of the bathroom.
Some days he would go out extremely happy
but some others he got very angry.
He would yell at us, try to hit us or push us.
Until the situation got unbearable.
We tried to communicate with Paco in a million ways,
but Paco doesn't speak,
he doesn't write nor he reads.
Until one day it occurred to me to draw.
"Draw what?", you might say.
Well, I started drawing all the items that were around Paco.
The items in the bathroom
or the items that were in the kitchen
to make him tell me
which ones made him angry.
Even though it doesn't seem true, thanks to that exchange of pictures,
Paco told us what was going on.
And what was going on was amazing.
Every time he walked into the bathroom,
he entered into another reality.
He imagined he was in the middle of the Civil War
and that as he played with his fingers and his hands,
he imagined he rose in ranks in the legion.
He started as corporal and rose until becoming a general.
The problem was when we interrupted him, of course.
The game would be over.
Ever since that day, we never interrupted him again.
And we really spared ourselves two daily disputes.
Thanks to this homemade and improvised solution,
we managed to solve a problem
in a very concrete situation.
But without realizing this would be the first
contribution to a solution
that would help thousands of people around the world.
And why do I live with Paco?
For you to understand why,
and especially to understand why
I am here today, I'll tell you my story.
When I was 5 my parents split up
and my mother took me with her away from my brother.
After having many men in and out of her life
and after her evident lack of interest in being a mother,
she returned me like a package.
At least I was back with my brother.
But the happiness was short lived.
Around the age of 8 or 9, I was sexually assaulted
by someone very close.
My fear, my innocence, my frustration,
made me isolate from everything.
I wasn't capable of telling anyone what had happened to me.
Not even to my brother, whom I loved the most.
I remained silent,
much like Paco did.
Nine years went by, it'd been 9 long years of silence
until I was 17 and I became capable
of telling my brother what had happened.
And because of this I would like to dedicate this talk to him.
I would like to dedicate the talk to him
for returning back to me,
but most of all for not judging me.
He was the key that opened the door to my communication.
He was the key to end all the agony
that I bore inside.
But these two experiences made me realize
that there are many people in the world
with the same problem as Paco and I.
So I set myself out to help them.
When I started studying special education
and the teaching practices,
I met many children
with cerebral palsy, with autism, it didn't matter.
They had the same problem: communication.
Then, I suddenly remembered the situation I had with Paco,
the exchange of pictures,
so I set myself to transform this situation into a tool;
a tool that would be really useful,
that would let them communicate
at any moment
and with anyone.
We started with a prototype
based on pictograms
distinguishing the different contexts
where the child could play or work
And within each of these contexts,
all the elements that they would need
to communicate.
Obviously, we tried it first with Paco
and it was a success.
But even so, he wasn't fully satisfied.
He looked at drawings, at pictograms
that made him feel like a child.
And he wasn't a child.
Then we realized that if we wanted the tool to be really functional,
we had to make it totally customized.
It should have the places he visited,
the people he knew,
the food he ate.
After that, he felt really comfortable with it.
We carried out an investigation
with more than 150 children in the Valencian Community.
And we kept in touch with professionals and parents.
But out of this investigation,
what I would like to share with you
is the contact that I had with these families.
"My child doesn't love me.
I haven't been a good mother."
This is what María told me.
María is the mother
of a 5 year-old child with autism who had never spoken.
María is fed up with looking for ways
to be able to reach her child
and know what's going on,
what he wants at any time.
But she can't.
"If at least he would look me in the eyes," she told me.
But María wasn't the only one that moved me.
"My child will always be useless."
Imagine the frustration a parent has
to say that his child,
his child will always be useless.
Javier is the father of a child with cerebral palsy
who doesn't walk, doesn't talk
and, moreover, he has a visual impairment.
Javier is fed up with looking for tools in technology
to be able to make his son communicate with him.
But he tells me,
"It's just that there's none that would adapt,
there is no technology adjusted
to what happens to my son."
And Javier is right.
If we go to any application store
and write, let's say,
"Applications for people with autism,"
there are thousands.
And all of them say they serve the same purpose.
But there are more than 67 million people
in the world with autism.
Really. Is this same static application
going to help them in the same way?
I don't think so.
And here's where the evolution of our tool started.
At this point it didn't only matter to us
the pathology the child had,
if they had paralysis, autism, and which level.
What mattered to us were many more things.
It mattered to us if they had epilepsy or not.
If they had a mental delay,
the level of language they had.
If we were working on a tool for communication
we had to know every one of the details:
what was their level of learning.
If we really wanted to create a unique tool
which would adjust to every single person.
With all these data,
our machine autogenerates
the best tool for each person,
taking into account each detail.
It autogenerates different panels of communication
that evolve
according to the evolution of the user.
This is connected to a platform
where it not only stores all this information
but it also stores all the materials,
all the pictures,
the audios, the videos.
In this way, they are available for any user
that wants to enter the platform
which makes this customization
much more simple, making it much easier
to make this tool unique.
A very simple example: a father
who goes to a zoo one day
and takes pictures of different animals with his tablet
This material goes automatically
to the platform and it's available
for maybe a teacher who would like to make
the same trip the following week.
Not only can he give an idea of the activity to the child,
but also the child will be able to communicate that day
with his friends and his teacher
without any kind of problem.
All of this is thanks to the use of artificial intelligence
which allows the machine
to learn from the child.
And also thanks to the use of "big data"
which allows the storage and analysis
of a large quantity of data in an efficient way.
Javier's son still cannot walk or talk
but now he has a tool that adapts to his visual impairment
and allows him to communicate with his father.
Maria's child is still not able to talk either
and he rarely looks into the eyes
but now he can tell his mother
that he wants cookies and not juice;
that he wants to go to the park, not the pool
or that he's angry because he has a stomachache.
In the world we meet many,
many people, and we don't know
why they behave in a strange way;
they behave in a way that is beyond
our normal standards.
I would like to ask you, if this happens to you,
don't abandon them, don't shun them.
The same way my brother was my key,
and I in turn was the key for Paco,
each and every one of you
can be the key for someone.
The key to communication.
The key to social integration.
Surely you all know him.
He's one of the greatest minds known in history.
But surely you don't know
that Einstein couldn't speak until the age of 4,
and he couldn't write until the age of 7.
In fact, many of his teachers
defined him as useless,
but his mother never gave up on him.
When I was assaulted,
and I started to behave in a strange way,
my teachers, including my family,
thought I would never achieve anything.
Now with 22 years I've graduated,
I'm doing my master's in neuropsychology,
I've founded an association for people with autism,
and I work every day to make people like Javier's son,
Maria's son, or Paco, able to communicate.
There are many Einsteins in the world,
plenty of yet undiscovered Einsteins.
It's in our hands not to lose any more of them.
Thank you.
(Applause)