VOICE-BRIDGE

Voice Bridge is a real-time, multimodal lip-reading assistive-communication tool for people with ALS. As ALS progressively destroys speech (80–85% of patients lose ▎ intelligible speech) while leaving the mind fully intact, urgent needs — "water," "raise the bed," "I'm choking" — can take minutes to communicate. Today's ▎ alternative, a $15–20k eye-tracker, is fragile to lighting and head angle and is abandoned by 30–50% of users. ▎ ▎ Voice Bridge reads the mouth instead of the gaze — the signal a patient can still produce — and fuses lip movement with blinks and small gestures to recover intent ▎ even when audio fails. Recovered intent is spoken aloud and routed as severity-graded, role-aware alerts (comfort → caregiver, clinical → nurse, emergency → entire ▎ circle of care), and the patient-specific understanding persists across staff turnover so a new nurse inherits what the system already knows. ▎ ▎ It runs on an ordinary camera and laptop via a capture → VSR → TTS adapter pipeline: a zero-dependency offline default that works today, with hosted lip-reading ▎ (Claude vision) and expressive voice (MiniMax) that activate when keys are provided. ▎ ▎ Honest caveat: this is an early assistive-research prototype, not a clinically validated medical device.

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