Inclusive Cross-sensory Social Play: Towards a new paradigm of assistive technology for early development of blind and visually impaired children

辅助技术（AT）帮助残疾人执行可能难以或不可能的功能。然而，它们的设计在很大程度上是基于对残疾的医学观点，侧重于解决医疗条件造成的功能限制，而忽略了残疾人与其环境之间意义的定位和社会性质。这无意中对残疾人，特别是残疾儿童融入社会产生了负面影响。这项建议是跨学科的研究，将从根本上改变我们设计，工程和评估盲人和视障儿童（BVI）辅助技术的方式。它的目的是超越视觉障碍的医学观点，通过整合体现和感知经验的概念与社会参与和共同的意义，使同龄人。其目的是开拓包容性技术研究的新方向，重点关注如何利用和通过包容性跨感官辅助技术促进残疾儿童和非残疾儿童之间的互动。我建议调查BVI和视力正常的儿童之间共享的跨感官认知，以建立一个替代框架，用于设计支持更具包容性的跨感官社交游戏体验的技术。要做到这一点，我将解决工程新的跨感官形状改变辅助技术的关键挑战，了解BVI和视力儿童的跨感官认知，与利益相关者共同设计跨感官社交游戏体验的概念模型，并评估一种新的包容性技术干预对儿童早期发展的有效性。在此过程中，我将为包容性辅助技术的新范式建立工程，科学和设计基础，这将彻底改变辅助技术研究，并围绕儿童早期发展和社会中残疾人的公平转变政策和实践。

Assistive technologies (ATs) help disabled individuals to perform functions that might be otherwise difficult or impossible. However, their design has been largely grounded in a medical view of disability, focusing on addressing the functional limitations imposed by medical conditions at the expense of accounting for the situated and social nature of meaning making between a disabled person and their environment. This has had inadvertent negative impact on the inclusion of disabled people in society, particularly for disabled children. This proposal is for interdisciplinary research that will radically change the way we design, engineer and evaluate assistive technologies for blind and visually impaired (BVI) children. It aims to move beyond a medical view of visual impairment by integrating notions of embodied and perceptual experience with social engagement and joint meaning making with peers. The aim is to carve new directions in technological research for inclusion by focusing on how interactions between disabled and non-disabled children can be facilitated with and through inclusive cross-sensory assistive technologies. I am proposing to investigate shared cross-sensory cognition between BVI and sighted children to ground an alternative framework for designing technologies that support more inclusive cross-sensory social play experiences. To do this, I will address key challenges in engineering novel cross-sensory shape-changing assistive technologies, understand cross-sensory cognition in BVI and sighted children, co-design conceptual models of cross-sensory social play experiences with stakeholders, and evaluate the effectiveness of a novel inclusive technological intervention for early child development in-situ. In doing so, I will establish the engineering, scientific and design foundations for a new paradigm for inclusive assistive technologies, which will revolutionise assistive technology research, and transform policy and practice around early child development and equity for disabled individuals in society.