Science & Design
Science & Design
What is the science behind the FluentPet system?
We've known for millennia that our dogs and other animals can understand the words we say.
With FluentPet customizable talking buttons and uniquely designed tiles to hold and organize buttons by word category, they can ‘say’ words too.
By grouping buttons in categories, learners can locate buttons first more generally, and then more specifically
The FluentPet System combines ideas from speech language pathology and cognitive science to design arrangements that help you and your dog (or 'learner,' as we call them) communicate and remember word locations.
The FluentPet System combines ideas from speech language pathology and cognitive science to design arrangements that help you and your dog (or 'learner,' as we call them) communicate and remember word locations.
While it’s still too early to provide scientific proof of the effectiveness of this approach, our expertise in cognitive science and years designing teaching tools for dogs has lead us to believe that our HexTile organization method is likely to be significantly easier to remember, for any learner, than sound buttons organized in a plain square grid. By grouping buttons in categories, learners can locate buttons first more generally, and then more specifically.
Sound Button Design
The FluentPet System is designed to be flexible to accommodate learners big or small, as well as learners who are either new to buttons or experienced. For smaller learners (e.g. mini and toy dog breeds), the buttons require relatively little pressure to activate.
In the case of larger dogs (and paws!), we recommend not filling each HexTile button space—instead, leave spaces between buttons until your learner gets more comfortable and precise with their button presses. By having a more sparse distribution of buttons, you simplify button organization for your learner, much like how children learning to write start with extra-wide lines before moving to narrower ones as their skill develops.
Ideogram Design
With most of our kits, we’ve included a sheet of ideogram stickers. These have been designed to let you label your buttons, making it easier for both you and your learner to remember which button is which.
FluentPet’s ideograms have been designed to be visually unique and distinguishable by learners and human teachers alike. Note that since we don’t expect most learners to be able to immediately recognize or understand an ideogram simply from its appearance, our focus has been to make them easy to tell apart from each other. For this reason, we’ve varied our designs in several ways, such as in form, layout, and visual spatial frequency.
HexTile Design
HexTiles are not only designed to securely hold sound buttons in place, but they also organize buttons by word category. A common color or visual pattern surrounding words of the same category makes it easier for a learner to remember which button is where—and improves the probability that your learner will recognize that words belong together in one grouping.
The idea of organizing words into categories for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) word boards is not a new idea. Our categories were inspired by the Fitzgerald Key, a tool developed in the early 1900s by Edith Mansford Fitzgerald. Ms. Fitzgerald was a deaf American teacher who used it to help her students construct sentences that were grammatically correct. We can’t yet be certain that the FluentPet approach to organizing button boards will be scientifically successful, but current user feedback indicates that this organization is significantly simpler to retain than sound buttons organized in a regular cartesian grid.
Solid color tiles provided better and striking visual location cues
In 2020, we designed the look of early HexTiles based on the assumption that we knew very little about what might or might not work. The first HexTiles used a combination of colors and patterns to help learners differentiate one from the other. However, by 2022, we transitioned from patterned tiles to solid color Hextiles, in great part due to detailed community feedback.
As the soundboard increased (and the learner’s vocabulary with it), users found that patterned HexTiles, when full, caused parts of the board to visually blend together, which became spacially challenging for our learners. Instead, we discovered that solid color tiles provided better and striking visual location cues.
What seems now to be the case is that learners are using the overall spatial organization of buttons and HexTiles to remember button identity (like how you or I might remember where the keys are on a keyboard). In spatial cognition, the easier it is to locate landmarks and boundaries, the easier it is to orient and navigate within a space. One common way we organize things around us is by creating and visually distinguishing different groups. For instance, on a map, you'll often see different regions or countries having different colors.
Similarly, placing words of the same category against solid color backgrounds makes it easier for a learner to remember button locations and improves the probability that they will recognize the words belong to a common group. Our goal with the solid color HexTiles was to make them distinguishable by those with dichromatic vision (as opposed to the trichromatic vision that most of us humans have). Dogs can see color, but they have roughly the color vision of someone with red-green color blindness. We chose this set of colors to make it easier for both humans and dogs to differentiate one from the other. Here you can see them as they appear on the FluentPet Connect faceplates:
We can approximate how they'd look to a dichromat by using Coblis, a color blindness simulator. In our case, that means dogs and cats would probably see something closer to this:
While some of the HexTiles are visually somewhat close (e.g. those that were previously red and green, or yellow and orange), they are still distinguishable by how light or dark they are.
Our hope is that solid color HexTiles will make it easier for learners to remember how things are organized—not so much by making individual HexTiles easier to recognize, but instead through color groupings, to create identifiable boundaries so that learners may recognize and orient themselves on their own.
Suggested Word Mapping
As such, the identification of particular colors with different sentence categories may not be as important as creating clear visual regions on the sound board.
For example, we have six colors here. By mapping each to a different kind of word, we may make it easier for us to see and understand each other's boards.
To this end, we suggest the following mapping:
Red: Social words
HI, BYE, LOVE YOU, YES, WANT, WHERE
[UPDATED IMAGE]
Orange: Sentence subjects
Sentence ‘subjects' (people and dogs usually).
Learner’s name, Person 1, Person 2, your name, etc.
Purple: Actions/verbs
PLAY, EAT, SETTLE, POTTY, COME, HELP, etc.
Blue: Sentence objects
The sentence ‘objects’ are much smaller (things we typically call 'objects' are usually on the smaller side).
TOY 1, TOY 2, BONE, OBJECT, FOOD, WATER, etc.
Green: Places
OUTSIDE, BED, WALK, KENNEL, INSIDE, UPSTAIRS, etc.
Yellow: Descriptors
GOOD, MORE, LATER, NOW, ALL-DONE, MAD
Note that these are very light guidelines—as you can see from the images above, you can likely get away with only using two contrasting colors. The color assignment above, however, should increase the apparent visual difference between categories (if you organize your HexTiles in categories of the same order), making the boundaries between them easier to see.
Social words (Red)
HI, BYE, LOVE YOU, YES, WANT, WHERE
The 'social' words are meant to be the most distinctive.
Orange: Sentence subjects
Sentence ‘subjects' (people and dogs usually). Learner’s name, Person 1, Person 2, your name, etc.
Descriptor Words
Yellow HexTile
What do you think of when you hear the words "descriptor words?" Probably adjectives like "Good," "Happy," and "All Done"
