Client: Magnusmode
Industry:
Mission: Magnusmode provides useful tools to empower people with autism and other cognitive special needs to participate more fully in the world, by partnering with market leaders to make products, services and everyday experiences more accessible.
MagnusMode
MagnusCards is a mobile app with digital “Card Decks” that present step-by-step instructions for life skills. With images, text and audio instructions, the decks help people with autism and other special needs to do everyday things like ride the bus, visit a local attraction, order in a restaurant, or check in at the airport. Magnusmode works with market leaders to deliver custom, branded, digital Card Decks that will increase accessibility for their customers who have cognitive special needs, by providing better access and engagement to their products and services in a fun, interactive way.
The Challenge
The client had an app that was being migrated from one technology to another. In addition to adding new functionality, it was necessary to migrate data.The project consisted of an administration panel from which the app could be maintained. Additionally, the content should allow for different languages and the text should be able to be transformed into sound. The app allows customers to access the content visually and aurally.
The Results
After changes, the application now has three possible languages (English, French and Spanish) and allows multiple translations for each deck. The API provides the appropriate information based on the language requested by the user.
Modifications were made to the models to handle different types of categories (community, public, private and sponsor), and a new functionality was added that allows the administrator to approve or disapprove decks.
The application has the same data from the previous system; however the assets are now stored independent of the server.
The Solution
– A series of scripts were created in Ruby using ActiveRecord (Active Record is the M in MVC), to migrate and adapt the data of the previous application to the new application.
– QXD used the service of AWS Comprehend (Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text) to obtain data from the previous application.
– An API based on the Ruby / Rails framework was implemented. Information about cards, decks and users can now be easily managed through the administration panel.
– The API serves the mobile application, managing the authentication of users and the management of categories, decks and text.
– QXD used the AWS Polly service (Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech), to translate text into audio.
– The AWS S3 service was used to store the assets of the application, images and audio of the decks.