ReadLiao

Problem

Many senior citizens face significant challenges in comprehending complicated letters sent in English, be it for healthcare matters, legal matters, or even basic daily communications.

Apart from language barriers and declining cognitive abilities, complex sentence structures and large bodies of text also pose substantial obstacles to seniors' comprehension, leading to confusion, frustration, and a sense of helplessness when dealing with long-form written content. 

As a result, *100% of seniors we’ve interviewed leave letters and documents to their caregivers or social workers to decipher, making them completely dependent on others to understand essential information. Yet, it costs the Government S$70 million each year to print and mail letters - letters that senior citizens in particular don’t read. 

How do we make letters make sense for them?

Solution

We conducted 2 rounds of research with 17 seniors. In the first round we validated the use case of readliao and concluded that seniors have a need to help them decipher complicated government letters. Our second round of research showcases the flow of simplifying letters and translating it into mandarin. All 10 seniors we tested found it useful, agreed that it makes letters easier to understand and are likely to recommend this to fellow seniors. Seniors were particularly impressed with the product’s ability to address user pain points like font size of letters (by allowing users to zoom into text) and ability to convert speech-to-text. 

Powered by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Large Language Model (LLM), ReadLiao transforms the reading experience for senior citizens. Our product deciphers long-form letters and documents, to provide clear and contextualized content that is easy for seniors to understand. 

With integrated language translations and audio prompts in all four official national languages, ReadLiao not only enhances comprehension for seniors but also ensures inclusivity across languages and literacy abilities.  You can view the walkthrough of the product here.

We believe in making information accessible to all, and ReadLiao is the key to unlocking a world of clarity for seniors, one letter at a time.

Try out our webapp here. For any queries or collaborations, email us at nicole@open.gov.sg 

Team Members

The team is currently working to pilot the product in the community and you may see it reach your hands soon!

Interested parties and/or agencies thus far:

• SGH medical social worker dept - sharing with their patients

• Fei Yue - in charge of AACs, sharing with their seniors

• EmpowerSG - they conduct digital training for seniors as part of the silversurfer program

• People's Association - want to roll this out at their customer help desks

• Care Corner - in charge of care corner centers, sharing with their seniors

• Enterprise SG - helpful for their communications to older business owners

• TTSH

• Tan Ken Hwee - Chief Transformation & Innovation Officer (Judiciary) at Supreme Court of Singapore