EAGER: New User-Centered Design Techniques for Building Assistive Technology for Children who are Presymbolic Communicators

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The project develops new user-centered design techniques for use by speech language pathologists and assistive technology specialists to engage parents of children with severe cognitive and communication impairments in the design, assembly, training, and evaluation of customized assistive technology. The target users are young "presymbolic communicators", which includes children who have no functional speech and no use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices, but who have idiosyncratic gestures, movements, and vocalizations that family members can understand. The population includes, for example, individuals with severe cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and Rett syndrome. The project provides such individuals with their first usable and adopted piece of assistive technology; and provides assistive technology practitioners, family members, and caregivers with an easily-replicated protocol and toolkit for developing and deploying AAC solutions on their own. The project engages graduate and undergraduate students in research and practice that solves specific real-world problems, and builds scientific theory that is badly needed in the field of assistive technology.The project establishes a new interdisciplinary approach to the design and deployment of assistive technology and AAC solutions. The approach integrates human-computer interaction (HCI) and communication disorder sciences (CDS), specifically the HCI-based approach of user-centered design with CDS-based approach of establishing and evaluating communication protocols. For example, consistent with CDS approaches, parents and children are engaged in a clinical setting to collect screening and evaluation data; and consistent with HCI approaches, families are engaged in participatory design sessions in their homes to fully explore ideas for new AAC devices. Through this multi-faceted user engagement, the project is developing fundamentally new (a) user-centered design processes to collaborate with parents and children to arrive at the precise child-device interaction that will work for a child with profound intellectual impairments, and (b) software and hardware toolkits to rapidly explore a wide range of customized user interactions to engage these presymbolic communicators.