A3CP is an open-source communication platform for people who cannot rely on speech. We work with families, clinicians, and care organisations to build systems that learn how each person communicates—through movement, sound, and context—rather than forcing them to adapt to rigid interfaces.
Across Europe, many people with severe motor or cognitive disabilities still lack reliable ways to communicate. Current assistive-communication tools often assume abilities—precise pointing, eye-tracking, symbol selection—that many do not have. A3CP is our attempt to close this gap.
Non-speaking people are often asked to fit into technology that was not designed for them. Systems built around fixed input methods can leave individuals isolated and caregivers overwhelmed, especially in understaffed welfare institutions.
A3CP is a modular, open-source platform that learns each person’s patterns of movement, sound, and context. Caregivers remain in the loop: they label gestures, confirm meanings, and guide how the system adapts over time.
By making ability-adaptive communication infrastructure openly available, we want to enable non-speaking people to express needs and preferences, reduce caregiver stress, and give welfare organisations tools they can audit, extend, and trust.
A3CP began with a family’s experience. Andrea’s son Eric, a bright and curious child with cerebral palsy, understands two languages and communicates through sound, movement, and expression—but does not yet speak. Everyday interactions made two things clear: the richness of his non-verbal communication, and the limits of existing assistive systems that required him to adapt to fixed input methods he could not reliably control.
Andrea’s wish to give her son a voice initiated a collaboration between technologists, designers, and researchers at The Open University (UK). Early prototypes combined simple sensors, gesture recognition, and participatory design with families and therapists. These experiments showed that even low-cost technology can capture meaningful signals when it is designed around individual ability.
GestureLabs was founded in Berlin to carry this work forward as a non-profit initiative. A3CP is now being developed as open, transparent infrastructure that care organisations, researchers, and families can freely use, improve, and share.
The Ability-Adaptive Augmentative Communication Platform is not a single app, but a stack of components that can be deployed in schools, care homes, therapy centres, and family homes.
A3CP takes in signals from cameras, microphones, and other sensors, turning movement, vocalisation, and environmental context into structured representations. The goal is to work with affordable, widely available hardware.
The platform learns over time how a specific person uses gestures and sounds to express meaning. Caregivers can label new actions, correct mistakes, and see how the system is changing—keeping humans in control of interpretation.
Recognised intents can be rendered as speech, text, or symbols and integrated with existing AAC tools where appropriate. The modular FastAPI-based stack and documented schemas are designed for extension and audit.
Shaping an adaptive communication system for non-speaking people requires principled choices about data, design, and governance.
We design around individual abilities and contexts, not around standardised gestures or abstract user models.
Caregivers label new actions, correct interpretations, and review how the system adapts over time.
Schemas, logs, and code are open so institutions can audit behaviour and adapt the platform to their needs.
We prioritise local processing, data minimisation, and clear documentation of how information flows.
We work with researchers, clinicians, and families using transparent methods and reproducible protocols.
A3CP is moving from research prototype to deployable, open-source infrastructure. Here is where we are now and what we are preparing next.
We are looking for partners in care, research, engineering, and policy who want to help shape ability-adaptive communication technology as open, transparent infrastructure.