Interactive visual supports for children with autism

             

Kanner first described autism in after noticing the shared symptom of a general lack of interest in other people in a group of children who had previously been referenced with various other labels, including simply mental retardation.

Since Kanner’s recognition of ‘‘Early Infantile Autism,’’ the scientific and medical communities’ views of autism have changed dramatically, broadening to include other related disorders. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a set of five conditions that begin early in life and often affect daily functioning throughout the lifetime.

Visual supports can be the kinds of things that we see in everyday life to support communication, such as body language or natural cues within the environment. They can also be tools explicitly created to support individuals who may have trouble interpreting naturally occurring visual cues. These constructed artifacts sometimes use images or tangible objects to represent simple everyday needs and elements of basic communication. In these cases, visual supports are used to augment communication, in much the same way that sign language can be a visual representation of language for someone with a hearing impairment. High-tech devices for augmentative and alternative communication can also help children with special needs build language skills over time.

Visual supports have been shown to reduce the symptoms associated with ASD. Despite their impressive benefits, use of visual supports continues to be difficult for many teachers, parents, and other caregivers.

Ubicomp technologies are particularly promising for the development of advanced visual supports that address these myriad challenges.

Methods

We have taken a mixed method approach to understanding visual supports for children with ASD. We made use of previous research led by the first author, including a multiyear ethnographic study of caregivers of children with autism, focus groups centered on children with autism spectrum disorder and their caregivers, and an in situ study of the deployment of a new ubiquitous computing technology for classrooms behavior management of children with special needs. Building on these results, we then undertook a qualitative field study to understand the needs of students and teachers in special education classrooms with a specific focus on visual communications and education tools.

Results

Through fieldwork, interviews, participatory design sessions, and focus group discussions, we designed, developed, and evaluated three novel ubicomp visual supports. In this section, we describe the results of these efforts, both in terms of their evaluation of our interventions and in terms of design implications for the creation of ubicomp technologies in support of children with ASD. We place particular emphasis here on the results of the focus group evaluation.

As a little conclusion, for children with SEN, however, many of whom are unable to communicate via traditional verbal language, visual supports offer them a way to become a part of their own culture and to learn. To use Vygotsky’s notions of cultural tools, visual supports are symbolic and technological tools that aid in communication 

Source: http://www.gillianhayes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/J6_PUC_Autism2010.pdf