It could be designed by a medical and speech-therapy team in close collaboration with Stroke Associations and other representatives of patients and families, and copies could be available in Post Offices, Libraries, schools, etc as well as in hospitals for patient-staff-visitor use.
One of the worst things for patients who cannot speak or write is the inability to communicate even urgent messages about their needs and wants, even though they still have the mental ability to think, learn, and remember. Sometimes in a hospital or emergency situation, people are faced with others who speak a completely different language. If there were a public system of signs, then in an emergency, communication could remain possible.
There would be alternative means of communicating the major needs, based on the behaviour that is most commonly remaining to paralysed and badly hurt people - eg communicating through the eyes, or gross motor movements of mouth or limb, or fine movements of one hand.
For example, suppose there was international agreement about eye movements:
Open wide = yes;
Moving round = don't know, not sure;
Blink quickly = food need;
Turned up = pain or discomfort;
Turned to nearest window or furthest wall = need for company;
Blink slowly = need for sleep;
Screwed up = want TV, book, radio, or other entertainment.
Once the major need has been communicated, other people can find out the exact need by asking questions that can be answered 'yes/no'.
Patients could be shown a large chart giving these signs and their meanings (in both print and symbol) so that they could use the sign they wished. Patients who could point in any way, eg finger, or stick between the teeth could also point to the message they wished to make.
Alternative means for the same messages could use tongue, fingers or toes, or head turning.
It is often too late to learn a 'Stroke Language' after communication has been cut off. Better for everyone to have some idea of it beforehand.
Valerie Yule, 57 Waimarie Drive, Mount Waverley, Vic. Australia 3149 (tel 807 4315).
There could be a role for Yule's Stroke Language, as a quick and simple language to complement the E-tram frame, and particularly for use in emergencies (although, as with the E-tram frame, it would be harder for stroke victims with damage to the left hemisphere of the brain to master). One of Yule's eye movements should indicate 'get me the E-tram frame, I have something complex to say.' Yule suggests involving schools; children could be taught ten or so basic eye movements at school as a kind of game - the movements might then have become second nature by the time they came to need them.