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)帮助残疾人执行原本可能很难或不可能实现的功能。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施加的功能限制，而不是考虑残疾人与其环境之间的意义创造的境遇和社会性质。这无意中对残疾人融入社会产生了负面影响，特别是对残疾儿童。这项建议是针对跨学科研究的，它将从根本上改变我们为盲人和视障(BVI)儿童设计、设计和评估辅助技术的方式。它的目标是超越视觉障碍的医学观点，将具体化和知觉经验的概念与社会参与和与同龄人的联合意义创造结合起来。其目的是为包容性技术研究开辟新的方向，重点是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。我提议调查英属维尔京群岛和有视力的儿童之间共享的跨感觉认知，以建立一个替代框架，以设计支持更具包容性的跨感觉社交游戏体验的技术。为此，我将解决设计新的跨感官形状改变辅助技术的关键挑战，了解英属维尔京群岛和视力正常儿童的跨感官认知，与利益相关者共同设计跨感官社交游戏体验的概念模型，并现场评估一种新的包容性技术干预对早期儿童发展的有效性。通过这样做，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平等改变政策和实践。

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.