Browsing by Author "Gunawardana, D.A.Y.K."

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    Augmentative and Alternative Communication Application for Adults with Language Difficulties: An Application Developed in Sinhala Language
    (Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka, 2019-02) Gunawardana, D.A.Y.K.; Jayathunaga, R.M.; De Silva, A.H.H.G.; Ekanayake, E.M.U.W.J.B.; Wilson, R.L.S.
    Many adults can experience acquired disorders such as stroke, Parkinson, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that can interfere with their ability to communicate with others. Currently, adult individuals who experience these kinds of difficulties need to rely on low- technology options such as printed out alphabet boards to express themselves. The number of words that a person used to communicate with others is much larger than the number of words printed on the boards, hence they face difficulties in communicating with the others. To address this issue, a text-based Augmentative & Alternative Communication system was developed in the Sinhala language for adult persons with speech disorders. The system comprises of three components keyboard layout for Sinhala fonts, next word prediction, and the text-to-speech converter. The methodology of the study was applied as follows. The requirements of the patients were collected from the Disability Rehabilitation Department at the Ragama Base Hospital. The requirements were analyzed case by case and a keyboard layout was designed by taking all the requirements into consideration. The most important module of this system is the next word predictor. This module assists a patient to predict the next word once he selects a word. The RNN neural network model was trained with a typical set of words that such a person often used. The word sequence was constructed from the requirements identified from the interviews with such patient and the health care professionals who have been working in this field for a significant period. A model was trained to perform text-tospeech using TensorFlow libraries. Once, the word predictor constructs the sentence, the whole sentence is converted into voice at once. The initial evaluation of the system was conducted only with patients who are being received treatments at the Ragama Hospital. The test results show that the system is able to communicate easily with patients in decent accuracy.
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    User-Friendly Applications for Sri Lankan Farmers: “Govi Nena”
    (Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka, 2020) Gunawardana, D.A.Y.K.; Indika, W.A.; Madushika, M.K.S.; Wathugala, D.L.; Piyaratne, M.K.D.K.; Samaraweera, G.C.
    Most of the Sri Lankan farmers are used to cultivate any selected crop traditionally, as they are taught to be from their farming society. Due to this reason, there will be an overproduction from the same crop within a particular season. Even several crop forecasting applications are available in Sri Lanka, lack of reliability is the main drawback of these applications. These applications fail to guide the farmers to get a detailed review due to the interfaces of these applications are unable to visualize the required data reliably. In this research, a “Govi Nena” mobile-based application and a web-based dashboard were developed to select the most accurate crops to be cultivated to get the highest market demand and yield in an instant and reliable way with the userfriendly interfaces. Farmers have to enter the data about the conditions of their land, soil types according to their agro-ecological zone to the mobile application when they register to the application. The mobile application links with crop knowledgebase and provides crop lists of what they need to cultivate and crop calendar for each crop based on the planting dates inserted by the farmers. The analysed information based on the farmer inputs through a mobile application will be visualized on the dashboard, which consists of multifunctional, proper, understandable, and user-friendly interfaces including tables, charts, and graphs. When a farmer uses this dashboard, he/she can get a clear understanding of; how the yield of each crop varies with the time, most compatible crops which have been cultivated in different areas, how the market price for the crops varies with the time, etc. The dashboard shows the relationships, comparisons, composition, and distributions of the information/knowledge. Farmers can get a clear picture through understandable visualizations via this dashboard for selected crops. Keywords: Web-based dashboard, Mobile-based application, Sri Lankan agriculture, famers