A Bridge to Success: Using AI to raise the bar in special education

...this is a fun one. How many cups do we have? One. Two. Three. High five. Good answering. All students should feel empowered, regardless of their abilities. That's why we're building AI tools to assist educators, teachers, therapists and parents. Get me the orange. Orange is mine. Good listening. Transforming special needs education, and we are doing it with our trusted partner Lenovo. We are Bridge AI. And this is how we are Raising The Bar for special needs education. In Hong Kong, one in ev

ery 20 children is diagnosed with autism and other disorders that fall under special education needs or SEN, and many more go undiagnosed. Which one is apple? We founded Bridge Academy in 2014 to provide early childhood intervention and individualized programs for children with learning difficulties. Our mission is to support SEN children in all aspects of life, from home to school, to navigating society. It's vital that these SEN children, get the therapeutic interventions at a young age. But t

his can be very expensive and not every family can afford it. One main method that teachers and therapists use when working with SEN students is called Applied Behavior Analysis or ABA. A typical ABA session involves the educator working on tasks with the student taking lots of notes about the student's behaviors and following a set of guidelines on how to properly respond to the student’s reactions. Sessions often take up to 3 hours. It's a demanding process. We realized that by using AI techno

logies like computer vision and attention monitoring we could streamline parts of the process, taking the burden off the educators. by automating away the mundane tasks, the teachers and therapists can be more focused and connected with the student. The Bridge AI platform is unobtrusive and easy to fit into the existing setting so that the process is seamless. If these functions can expand, this can really support lifelong learning. To power our AI we needed a video and audio analytics engine an

d we built this in partnership with Lenovo. The model is trained on thousands of hours of footage where it learns to identify objects and behaviors. Using a camera in the classroom, The AI is able to identify objects and track body movements. This makes the therapist job so much easier, allowing them to see more students in a day and have more meaningful interactions with students. High ten. At Lenovo, we believe in AI for All. We work closely with Bridge AI to understand their needs from the gr

ound up, from helping them build their architecture to connecting them with the university, we're able to assist in every step of the process. My dream is to send tutors to remote and underserved regions of the world, using AR glasses to work with SEN children. Connection is at the heart of any learning model. But for this solution, the connection that matters most is the connection with their teachers and parents. Therapists at Bridge has given him the ability to focus, to concentrate, communic

ation, lateral thinking, socializing one on one. These are critical skills that have to be taught, especially to an SEN kid. Can you touch your nose? When you see the look on a child's face and they finally make a breakthrough... What about this time, touch my nose? These are the moments that make it all worthwhile.