If you could develop a mobile application of your own, what would it be? In Russia, a student with cerebral palsy created an application to enhance the quality of life for disabled people and won the Grand Prix of the Samsung Innovation Campus competition in Russia. Check out Gleb's story and see how he aspires to create a world where people with special needs can communicate with no barriers.

Hi. I'm Gleb. Last summer I graduated Samsung Innovation Campus. It has been my lifelong dream to create a mobile application that could help disabled people.

Unlike the usual cases where students aren't certain about an application idea, I had no doubts. As a person with cerebral palsy, the priority of my app was to help people with special needs to fully communicate with the world. There's a wide pool of applications but each for different purposes like speech synthesis, artificial vision, reminders, and more. I wanted to combine everything I needed in one application.

When you start a project, everything changes dramatically. You spend at least 10 hours a day working on the project, constantly redoing something because you find more suitable solutions. However, at the same time, working on my application was the most exciting thing in my life. I just sat and coded for several months, enjoying it.

The coding process wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for Samsung Innovation Campus. The program helped me master the basics of Java and Android. I also dug in deeper, studying how speech synthesis and recognition, computer vision, and heart rate tracking work to incorporate them into my design. Even after the program, I joined the Android bootcamp by Samsung Innovation Campus, where I was instantly intrigued by MVVM, Data Binding, and Material Design. These technologies have largely been incorporated into the application.

After months of development, my application Parus was launched. Parus uses computer vision and speech synthesis technologies to facilitate everyday communication for people with disabilities, like object recognition for the blind, speech synthesizer for people with speech impairments, speech recognition and transformation into text for hearing impaired people, and more.

Parus is now available on Google Play (Russian), but I won't stop here. In the coming years, I will be joining ITMO University here in my homeland. Many more options that can help the disabled people will also be added onto Parus, so stay tuned!