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History of ZYGO: Happy 28th Birthday to ZYGO.
ZYGO was founded on February 5, 1974. The Model 16 scanning communication system was the first communication aid ZYGO engineered. Within the next 12 years many products, including TETRAscan and ZYGO Notebooks were designed. In 1988, PARROT, the first ZYGO product that held a digitized speech chip was introduced. The overwhelming need and interest of the disabled community led ZYGO to engineer the MACAW, a product that through multiple developments has evolved to its current stage. Today, ZYGO is engineering products that satisfy the computer needs of people with disabilities. These products focus on dynamic displays, intelligible speech, increased portability and battery life, among many other features. Our broad product line of augmentative and alternative communication systems addresses many solutions to different disabilities. ZYGO Representatives and Dealers around the world assist people with profound disabilities in choosing an appropriate device for the individual.

According to the Chinese astrological calendar, ZYGO is a tiger — "Born leader" is the keyword for tigers. They are sensitive, compassionate and considerate, aggressive, courageous and candid; deep thinkers and careful planners. Go tiger!

Revisited: MACAW Personality Transfer Program — A way to backup your MACAW Files
Setting up a MACAW for an individual is a time-consuming process. There is the key-pattern, levels, delay and access times, key-links, scan rates, etc., and, most of all, the recordings. It would be very helpful if all of that setup could be preserved for the unforeseeable failure that wipes out everything. Or, in the case where multiple users work with the same MACAW, it would be convenient to store a user's setup and reload the MACAW with someone else's.

The unique configuration of a MACAW's setup is referred to as its Personality. The MACAW Personality Program for DOS provides the means to save the information from a MACAW's Active Personality to DOS-based personal computers (PCs).

The program is called MACAWXFR.EXE and is an MS-DOS program that transfers the current contents (Personality) of a ZYGO MACAW to and from an IBM-compatible personal computer.

Less than a month before Fern died she used magnetic alphabet letters on a cookie sheet to spell "mall". She was asking her daughter at the end of a session to take her shopping. Fern lived into her death.* She had continued as many of her daily life activities as long as possible.

I had known Fern since shortly after her diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), often familiarly called "Lou Gehrig's Disease". She lived with her husband in a remote area of Oregon. He willingly brought her into my office for an assessment. After that first session he agreed to bring her in weekly despite the fact that the travel was three times longer than any single appointment.

They arrived with their daughter who was visiting from another state for the evaluation. They were terrified. This disease was progressing rapidly and they did not know how to cope with the almost weekly changes it was creating in their lives. This first appointment was four years prior to Fern's death.

There are many areas I cover with a client during a first appointment. Most important though is to establish the foundation of a relationship. Regardless of the speech intelligibility or the swallow safety or the daily survival needs, I need to begin forming a relationship that will sustain us until death, and frequently beyond death for the surviving family members.

This was easy to establish with Fern and her daughter, Erin. Both were eager for information and for comfort. During a first visit I attempt to stay away from "high tech" augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices. I attempt to communicate with the individual, as she is currently able or not. It allows me to feel as well as to observe the total communication needs. I also need to complete a thorough exam of all needs because this will assist us in selection of a communication system that meets those needs, and not just speech or talking replacement.

This first assessment revealed that Fern had attended school only through the middle grades. She did not know if her learning limits were the result of poverty or a learning disability or something else. Over the next four years I would come to know that the something else was the primary factor. I also learned during the oral motor speech examination that Fern would experience severe dysphagia** and dysarthria*** that would advance into anarthria*** before many more weeks passed.

Of critical importance I learned that this was not a family that I could just assess for a communication system and send them out the door. They needed to talk. They needed some insight to the "why us" and the "oh God, what do we do now." They needed slow introduction to this new life that seemed violently thrust upon them. They needed to learn that this new life was not going away and that it is possible to embrace its living process.

During the early weeks, it was important to Fern to talk without aids while I remained honest and direct whenever the communication between us faltered. We used this early time to assess her swallow safety needs as well as numerous independent living needs. As we were getting to know each other I would access different AAC tools to assist us with communication.

I would offer specific yes and no questions to redirect us back to topic. I would encourage Fern to try writing single word responses. Since she was close to illiterate, I taught her a simple sound based method of writing words. Later a telegraphic process was added to streamline her process and conserve her energy. This phonetic, telegraphic communication process partially sustained Fern until about a month before her death.

We explored communication books that were picture based but Fern rapidly eliminated those as she was learning functional and clever gestural processes to meet her survival needs. Instead we developed some basic flash cards that she kept with her for specific communication. Over the years these cards rotated frequently to meet her ever-changing needs.

Within those first few months her daughter decided to return to Oregon and stay with her mother as the primary caregiver. Erin became her mother's voice. She also became a proficient speech reader. Long after Fern became anarthric with no speech intelligibility the daughter could interpret her mother's lip actions to maintain relatively effective and reliable communication.

Erin also encouraged Fern to try some higher linguistic based communication processes. Together the two of them became acquainted with a LightWRITER**** . The first thirty days was an assessment period. They learned the basic skills and then began exploring together how it might serve them functionally. They continued to rent a LightWRITER system until about the last six months of the illness. Continue reading on this interesting topic...

* Levine, Steven: Healing into Life and Death, Doubleday, 1987
** dysphagia: Impaired swallowing following the breakdown in one or more of the phases of the normal swallowing sequence results in dysphagia. Within ALS dysphagia has a neurogenic base. Dysphagia frequently impacts the individual's safety for sustaining health and adequacy of oral intake for nutrition.
*** dysarthria and anarthria: This is a disruption of speech production affecting articulation, the quality of voice, pitch, loudness and rate of speech. Dysarthria may be so mild that the patient sounds a little different but is intelligible. It can be so severe that the patient is not understood at all. Drooling and swallowing problems may accompany dysarthria. Dysarthria may result from brain damage to brain cells controlling the muscles of speech or to inadequate nerve innervations. The sensation ability of the speech mechanism may be involved as well. Anarthria is similar to dysarthria but with no speech intelligibility. Phonation is present but no intelligible speech.
**** LightWRITER: A dedicated augmentative communication aid that includes DECtalk, a speech synthesizer, allowing the user to engage in interactive conversation. This AAC aid has many features and is easy to learn for almost immediate functional uses. For more information about this AAC aid please contact ZYGO Industries, Inc.

February 2002

March 2002

April 2002

A step toward independence
"My 12 year old daughter who had to be persuaded to start using the LightWRITER during her rental period, is now doing great! She used it on Monday when she wanted to go to Dairy Queen. I usually go in with her. She went in by herself with her LightWRITER and ordered her Oreo Blizzard. She came out beaming. I could see her through the windows where I was parked. What a step towards independence!"

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