Method And System For Acquisition Of Literacy

• US 20120088211A1
• Filed: 10/05/2011
• Published: 04/12/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 10/06/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Psyentific Mind, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Psyentific Mind, Inc.
• Inventors: Massaro, Dominic William
• Granted Patent: US 9,028,255 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 434/178
• CPC Class Codes: G09B 17/006 with audible presentation of the material to be studied audio and audio-visual teaching apparatus in general G09B5/04, G09B5/06

Abstract

A computer-implemented method for enabling a child to learn to read, including maintaining a data store with information that characterizes the reading capabilities of children, receiving a stream of sensor data from one or more input devices, the sensor data representing the speech of a person speaking, the person being either an adult or a child, or a sequence of scenes, identifying a meaningful utterance or a meaningful scene from the stream of sensor data, representing the meaningful utterance or meaningful scene in written text using words and grammar appropriate to the reading level of the child, based on information stored in the data store, providing the output text to a display device for presentation to the child, and receiving user feedback.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for enabling a child to learn to read, comprising:

maintaining a data store with information that characterizes the reading capabilities of children;

receiving a stream of sensor data from one or more input devices, said sensor data representing the speech of a person speaking, said person being either an adult first person, or a child second person;

identifying a meaningful utterance from the stream of sensor data;

determining the identity of the child;

representing the utterance in written text using words and grammar appropriate to the reading level of the child, based on information stored in the data store; and

providing the output text to a display device for presentation to the child.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein said information that characterizes the reading capabilities of children includes rules to apply to text based on the age or reading level of a child and said representing the meaningful utterance in written text is based in part on said rules.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said information that characterizes the reading capabilities of children includes rules for formatting text based on the age or reading level of a child, further comprising determining the presentation format of the written text based on said rules for formatting text and providing said presentation format along with the written text to the display device.

4. The method of claim 3, further comprising:

assessing the emotion in the meaningful utterance; and

additionally basing said determining the presentation format on the assessed emotion in the meaningful utterance

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising selecting said display device from a plurality of display devices.

6. The method of claim 1, further comprising receiving commands from the first person or the second person.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein said sensor data includes image data describing visual characteristics of the physical surroundings of the first person and second person, further comprising:

performing bar code detection on the image data to detect a bar code; and

including a text description of information encoded in the bar code in said written text.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein said sensor data includes a sequence of images that represent the person speaking, further comprising:

performing face and gesture recognition on the stream of images to identify the speech of the person speaking; and

determining the identity of the person speaking, said determining based in part on the identified speech.

18. The method of claim 1 or 9, wherein at least one of said input devices is selected from the group consisting of a digital video camera, a digital camera, and a microphone.

9. A computer-implemented method for enabling a child to learn to read, comprising:

maintaining a data store with information that characterizes the reading capabilities of children;

receiving a stream of sensor data from one or more input devices, said sensor data representing a sequence of scenes, each scene including a child;

identifying a meaningful scene from the sequence of scenes;

determining the identity of the child in the meaningful scene;

representing the meaningful scene in written text using words and grammar appropriate to the reading level of the child, based on information stored in the data store; and

providing the written text to a display device for presentation to the child.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein said information that characterizes the reading capabilities of children includes rules to apply to text based on the age or reading level of a child and said representing the meaningful scene in written text is based in part on said rules.

11. The method of claim 9, wherein said information that characterizes the reading capabilities of children includes rules for formatting text based on the age or reading level of a child, further comprising determining the presentation format of the written text based on said rules for formatting text and providing said presentation format along with the written text to the display device.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

assessing the emotion in the meaningful scene; and

additionally basing said determining the presentation format on the assessed emotion in the meaningful scene.

13. The method of claim 9, further comprising selecting said display device from a plurality of display devices.

14. The method of claim 9, further comprising receiving commands.

15. The method of claim 9, wherein said sensor data includes image data, further comprising:

performing bar code detection on the image data to detect a bar code; and

including a text description of information encoded in the bar code in said written text.

16. The method of claim 9, wherein said sensor data includes image data, further comprising:

performing optical character recognition on the image data to detect text; and

including the detected text in said written text.

17. The method of claim 9, wherein said sensor data includes a sequence of images, further comprising:

performing gesture recognition on the sequence of images to identify gestures performed by at least one person in at least one of said sequence of scenes;

determining, based at least in part on said identified gestures, the identity of the at least one person; and

determining at least one action corresponding to the identified gestures of the at least one person.