Giveaway: Voice4u is helping your child Communicate

Read all the way through this post to find out how you can WIN a Voice4u application! (woot!)

Parents of children with special needs know the heartache and frustration that often accompanies trying to provide their child with the services and care needed for their child to lead a healthy and productive life.

Yumi Kubo is one example.

Yumi Kubo, is the mother of a 15-year-old autistic son, and the founder and CEO of Spectrum Vision. She has created a communication application on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad called “Voice4u”.

Because her son is autistic and needed support with speaking, she purchased an augmentative and alternative communication device through her insurance. It took 6 months, and a lawyer to convince her insurance company to provide this device.

During that time, the therapists’ assessment was more than $1,000, (PLUS the $1,000 paid to an attorney to negotiate with the insurance company.)

This communication system was extremely hard to learn, not to mention how heavy and large and almost impossible it was to carry it around.

But the real kicker came when, after all of this, teachers and therapists explained to Yumi that the device was not fit for her son and he would never use it.

Can you feel the frustration yet?

Next, Yumi decided to purchase a communication application for the iPhone.

Unfortunately, this application had too many different functions which made it too hard for her son to use. ( $190 lost in a second!) The speech therapist who had 25 years of experience couldn’t use it, and Yumi’s engineers and her co-founder who has a Ph.D. from Stanford weren’t able to use it either.

Finally Yumi decided to take the issue into her own hands. She spoke with engineers, therapists, doctors and teachers, and all of these people were able to help her create Voice4u.

Thinking at first that it would be a personal application just for her son, Yumi soon realized that people around the world with disabilities should use Voice4u too, since they all need the support.

And thus Voice4u begun it’s worldwide journey.

The beauty that is Voice4u includes:

And folks, this is a BIG ONE. READ CAREFULLY:

• Unlike other iPhone communication assistance applications that cost SIX TIMES AS MUCH AS Voice4u.com, Voice4U allows you to RECORD YOUR OWN VOICE WITH YOUR OWN PICTURES.

Voice4u is also an excellent tool for those adopting from foreign countries needing help in making the language transition.

Yumi has generously offered to give one of our readers a free Voice4U application.

All you need to do to enter is to watch this short demo video of how Voice4u works and then come back and leave a comment telling one thing you learned about Voice4u.

If you would like extra entries:

Follow Voice4u on Twitter.

Hang out with Voice4u on Facebook.

Follow me and the Brave Hero on Twitter AND tweet about this contest. You can tweet daily. Just be sure to leave a comment each time you do.

Because I choose to blog with integrity: This is indeed a sponsored post. The revenue from this post went directly into Parker’s Medical Fund. Parker also received a free Voice4u application to try out. We love it. Please be advised that if this product would have not been fantastic there would have been absolutely no way I would have offered up this post or giveaway. Oh, and today’s breakfast included a tangerine spritzer and a piece of toast with organic sunflower seed butter I bummed off of Parker.