Spe-Ler: Serious Gaming for Youngsters with Intellectual Disabilities

When working with youngsters with intellectual disabilities, it is often a challenge to teach them ‘boring’ content (e.g. the ‘rules of daily living’ in their school or care-center). In this paper we propose a serious gaming approach in order to facilitate the learning process. The novelty in our concept is that we decouple the game and the didactical content, which allows us to transfer the learning to the youngster’s leisure time. In our research, we built a framework containing several (fun) games and an administration environment that facilitates the creation of learning content. In a user experiment, measuring the user’s joy and motivation we found that the subjects enjoyed playing the games and were very attentive when the didactical content appeared.status: publishe

Unity is Strength: How User Feedback Influences Technical Decisions in the Able to Include Project

status: publishe

ICT Inclusief: Train de trainer voor het aanleren van ICT-vaardigheden aan personen met een verstandelijke beperking

In scholen voor buitengewoon onderwijs type 2 en in dagcentra voor volwassenen met een verstandelijke beperking blijkt het gebruik van de computer moeizaam ingang te vinden. Het probleem ligt niet zozeer bij het erkennen van de waarde van ICT voor deze doelgroep, wel bij de toegankelijkheid van het medium. Uit expertinterviews met leerkrachten en begeleiders blijkt dat zij zichzelf te weinig ICT-competent voelen om met personen met een verstandelijke beperking met de computer aan de slag te gaan. Bovendien blijkt het aanleren van ICT-vaardigheden aan de doelgroep maatwerk te zijn. De onderzoeksgroep Inclusie en ICT van Thomas More Kempen ontwikkelde een competentieprofiel en een negenstappenplan voor begeleiders en leerkrachten.status: accepte

Building an Accessible Pictograph Interface for Users with Intellectual Disabilities

This paper presents a pictograph interface for Pictograph-to-Text translation, which facilitates the construction of written text on social media platforms for users with Intellectual Disabilities. For the design of the interface, a user-centred approach was adopted. Results show that the target group can appreciate accessing social media through pictograph-based technologies.status: publishe

Towards Integrating People with Intellectual Disabilities in the Digital World

Information and Communication Technologies have radically changed the way in which we access and share information. However, accessibility for all is still far from being a reality. People with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD) currently have very limited access to the information society and, in particular, to social media websites. Even though the recent technological advances have provided valuable support for people with disabilities, the focus has in most cases been placed on sensory and physical impairments, while IDD is normally not on the agenda of technology developers. In this paper, we will describe how the Able to Include project is changing this situation, using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. We will also describe how the pilot studies guide us in improving our tools.status: publishe

Immersive Care: Enhancing care through virtual environments

The Immersive Care project (www.immersivecare.be), is lead by Thomas More University of Applied Sciences (Health & Care Challenges, Mobilab & Care, and Creative & Innovative Business) and funded by the Flemish government: Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO-TETRA). The project aims to create synergy between care providers and tech companies who aim to optimize the wellbeing of patients during their treatment or stay in a care facility. To do so, we make use of immersive technologies (ImT) such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and 360° videos. ImT create a sense of immersion in an artificial environment that replaces or changes (augments) the real environment, such that users get carried away (immersed) in a newly created environment. Accumulating evidence supports the use of ImT in multiple fields of healthcare. Therefore, in this project we aim to study the implementation of ImT in several Flemish healthcare settings, namely nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, paediatric hospital units and care facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities

TRR 2650

Persons with intellectual disabilities (PwIDs) often aspire to more social inclusion by engaging in more community activities but encounter social barriers when traveling independently. Therefore, PwIDs are often accompanied by family members, friends, or volunteers. In order to both support the independent outdoor mobility of PwIDs themselves and reduce the caregivers' burden, the geographic information system-based application "Viamigo" was developed (www.viamigo.be), which allows a personal coach to monitor an individual in real time from a distance. The goal is to teach PwIDs a known individual route that they can accomplish independently while being monitored by a personal coach, caregiver, family member, or friend who is taking care of the individual making the trip. Viamigo determines the location of the user and compares this in time and space within a predetermined range and automatically sends notifications to the coach in case the user deviates from the route, travels at an incorrect speed, or enters or leaves a safe or dangerous zone, among other factors. Besides this on-route functionality, Viamigo also allows the creation of geofences around destinations (to monitor whether the user stays within a predefined zone) and emergency tracking. The initial results are promising: PwIDs successfully used Viamigo for a heterogeneous set of trips performed by several travel modes (bus, cycling, and walking) for several activity purposes (both daily recurrent trips to the day center and trips for shopping, social, and recreational purposes) and for different distances