Alisa Brownlee, ATP, CAPS blog offers recent articles and web information on ALS, assistive technology--augmentative alternative communication (AAC), computer access, and other electronic devices that can impact and improve the quality of life for people with ALS.
Email--abrownlee@alsa-national.org.
Any views or opinions presented on this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the ALS Association.
Just
saw this posting today….new iPad case says it’s “nearly indestructible”….
I
have always used the Griffin Survivor Case and can thankfully say none of the
iPads in our loaner closet have ever had a cracked screen or hardware
issues. It’s nice to have another choice now…
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By
Accessory maker OtterBox recently launched a new rugged iPad case in collaboration with Realtree that will safeguard your tablet like a boss. The Defender Series for the iPad 2 and third and fourth-generation iPad will give you the protection you need without being too bulky or “extreme” looking.
The Realtree Camo case features three layers of protection. It features a built-in screen protector and also includes a durable shield that doubles as a stand so you can display your iPad while watching movies, playing games, and even typing.
The Defender series includes two Realtree Camo designs, the “Xtra” which is bright orange and black to compliment your hunting gear, and the “AP Pink” which is two-toned gray with a pink hued picture on it.
The case is made from high-impact polycarbonate and includes a foam insert to add extra shock-absorption protection. The silicon outer-layer absorbs the bump while the textured exterior offers improvement to the grip. All buttons and ports are covered with a silicone cover to protect from dust and debris.
You can order the Defender Series in Realtree Camo Xtra or AP Pink from OtterBox’s website for $99.99. For a limited time, you can get a free dvd of Monster Bucks XX Vol. 1 or Vol. 2 when you purchase a Defender Series Realtree camo iPad case from OtterBox.
Google's Project Glass. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
Trends get a bad rap, mostly because they are often equated with fashions. Talk about trends and people immediately start imagining wafer thin models strutting down catwalks in outrageous outfits, or maybe a new shade of purple that will be long forgotten by next season.
Yet trends can be important, especially those long in the making. If lots of smart people are willing to spend years of their lives and millions (if not billions) of dollars on an idea, there’s probably something to it.
Today, we’re on the brink of a new digital paradigm, where the capabilities of our technology are beginning to outstrip our own. Computers are deciding which products to stock on shelves, performing legal discovery and even winning game shows. They will soon be driving our cars and making medical diagnoses. Here are five trends that are driving it all.
1. No-Touch Interfaces
We’ve gotten used to the idea that computers are machines that we operate with our hands. Just as we Gen Xers became comfortable with keyboards and mouses, Today’s millennial generation has learned to text at blazing speed. Each new iteration of technology has required new skills to use it proficiently.
That’s why the new trend towards no-touch interfaces is so fundamentally different. From Microsoft’s Kinect to Apple’s Siri to Google’s Project Glass, we’re beginning to expect that computers adapt to us rather than the other way around.
The basic pattern recognition technology has been advancing for generations and, thanks to accelerating returns, we can expect computer interfaces to become almost indistinguishable from humans in little more than a decade.
2. Native Content
While over the past several years technology has become more local, social and mobile, the new digital battlefield will be fought in the living room, with Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and the cable companies all vying to produce a dominant model for delivering consumer entertainment.
One emerging strategy is to develop original programming in order to attract and maintain a subscriber base. Netflix recently found success with their “House of Cards” series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Amazon and Microsoft quickly announced their own forays into original content soon after.
Interestingly, HBO, which pioneered the strategy, has been applying the trend in reverse. Their HBO GO app, which at the moment requires a cable subscription, could easily be untethered and become a direct competitor to Netflix.
3. Massively Online
In the last decade, massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft became all the rage. Rather than simply play against the computer, you could play with thousands of others in real time. It can be incredibly engrossing (albeit a bit unsettling when you realize that the vicious barbarian you’ve been marauding around with is actually a 14 year-old girl).
Now other facets of life are going massively online. Khan Academy offers thousands of modules for school age kids, Code Academy can teach a variety of programming languages to just about anybody and the latest iteration is Massively Online Open Courses (MOOC’s) that offer university level instruction. (For a good example, see here).
The massively online trend has even invaded politics, with President Obama recently reaching out to ordinary voters through Ask Me Anything on Reddit and Google Hangouts.
4. The Web of Things
Probably the most pervasive trend is the Web of Things, where just about everything we interact with becomes a computable entity. Our homes, our cars and even objects on the street will interact with our smartphones and with each other, seamlessly.
What will drive the trend in the years to come are two complementary technologies: Near Field Communication (NFC), which allows for two-way data communication with nearby devices and ultra-low power chips that can harvest energy in the environment, which will put computable entities just about everywhere you can think of.
While the Web of Things is already underway, it’s difficult to see where it will lead us. Some applications, such as mobile payments and IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, will become widespread in just a few years. Marketing will also be transformed, as consumers will be able to seamless access digital products from advertisements in the physical world.
Still, as computing ceases to be something we do seated at a desk and becomes a natural, normal way of interacting with our environment, there’s really no telling what the impact will be.
5. Consumer Driven Supercomputing
Everybody knows the frustration of calling to a customer service line and having to deal with an automated interface. They work well enough, but it takes some effort. After repeating yourself a few times, you find yourself wishing that you can just punch your answers in or talk to someone at one of those offshore centers with heavy accents.
Therein lies the next great challenge of computing. While we used to wait for our desktop computers to process our commands and then lingered for what seemed like an eternity for web pages to load, we now struggle with natural language interfaces that just can’t quite work like we’d like them to.
Welcome to the next phase of computing. As I previously wrote in Forbes, companies ranging from IBM to Google to Microsoft are racing to combine natural language processing with huge Big Data systems in the cloud that we can access from anywhere.
These systems will know us better than our best friends, but will also be connected to the entire Web of Things as well as the collective sum of all human knowledge. The first of these, IBM’s Watson, costs $3 million to build, but that price will drop to about $30,000 in ten years, well within the reach of most organizations.
When Computers Disappear
When computers first appeared, they took up whole rooms and required specialized training to operate them. Then they arrived in our homes and were simple enough for teenagers to become proficient in their use within a few days (although adults tended to be a little slower). Today, my three year old daughter plays with her iPad as naturally as she plays with her dolls.
Now, computers themselves are disappearing. They’re embedded invisibly into the Web of Things, into no-touch interfaces and into our daily lives. While we’ve long left behind loading disks into slots to get our computers to work and become used to software as a service – hardware as a service is right around the corner.
That’s why technology companies are becoming a increasingly consumer driven, investing in things like native content to get us onboard their platform, from which we will sign onto massively online services to entertain and educate ourselves.
The future of technology is, ironically, all too human.
AT&T is developing a mobile personal emergency response system (MPERS) to help elderly people when they fall. The platform will use GPS functionality and machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to connect patients remotely to medical professionals at monitoring centers.
The company is collaborating with Valued Relationships, Inc. (VRI) and Numera on the service. VRI provides telehealth monitoring and medical alert systems to seniors, the chronically ill and patients with disabilities. Numera manufactures a Libris MPERS device that works with monitoring software to remotely manage two-way voice, automatically detect falls and track seniors' location.
"With the MPERS mobility solution AT&T is developing, older people will be able to live independently but know that they are only seconds away from assistance if the need arises," Dr. Geeta Nayyar, AT&T's chief medical information officer, said in a statement.
AT&T will offer the MPERS as a managed service as well as provide wireless connectivity and sales, marketing and customer support.
Announced on March 4, the MPERS use two-way wireless voice communication to allow patients and caregivers to connect using the MPERS. The platform is designed for elderly people with disabilities, those prone to falls and people that need emergency connectivity to caregivers while still living independently.
One out of three adults ages 65 and older fall each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 20 to 30 percent of falls result in moderate to severe injuries, including lacerations, hip fractures or head traumas.
The wireless company will market the service to nursing agencies, day care services and home health care providers.
AT&T demonstrated the MPERS platform in New Orleans at the HIMSS13 conference, organized by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
The MPERS device's GPS functionality will report on a patient's location every 3 to 5 minutes, said Eleanor Chye, assistant vice president for AT&T ForHealth, told eWEEK in an email.
"Should a person fall while wearing the sensor, built-in technology will detect it and automatically alert a monitoring call center," said Chye. "A professional from the call monitoring center will reach out to the individual through instant two-way wireless voice communication on AT&T's network."
"When falls and acute medical events (such as heart attacks or strokes) occur, each second that passes matters," said Chye. "Individuals need to be able to immediately alert emergency services and their caregivers when these critical moments happen."
"Having access to additional data through the end-to-end RPM solution, such as a patient's blood sugar levels, weight, and blood pressure, could give providers invaluable information about what triggered the fall," Chye said.
The two platforms could work together to "help provide a clearer picture of what's really going on with a patient when they are outside the four walls of a hospital," said Chye.
Brian T. Horowitz is a freelance technology and health writer as well as a copy editor. Brian has worked on the tech beat since 1996 and covered health care IT and rugged mobile computing for eWEEK since 2010. He has contributed to more than 20 publications, including Computer Shopper, Fast Company, FOXNews.com, More, NYSE Magazine, Parents, ScientificAmerican.com, USA Weekend and Womansday.com, as well as other consumer and trade publications. Brian holds a B.A. from Hofstra University in New York.Follow him on Twitter: @bthorowitz
European researchers are testing a mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton that could enable fully paralysed people to walk again.
The €2.75m Mindwalker project uses an easily fitted electrode cap placed on the patient’s head to read brain signals related to movement that can be turned into commands for operating the exoskeleton.
The robotic suit itself, which is attached to the patient’s legs, is designed to mimic more closely the way people walk than other exeskeletons that require an additional walking frame or sticks to support the user.
‘Mindwalker was proposed as a very ambitious project intended to investigate promising approaches to exploit brain signals for the purpose of controlling advanced orthosis, and to design and implement a prototype system demonstrating the potential of related technologies,’ said project coordinator Michel Ilzkovitz of the Space Applications Services in Belgium.
He added that the technology developed for Mindwalker could also have applications in stroke victim rehabilitation and in assisting astronauts rebuild muscle mass after prolonged periods in space.
Once tests with able-bodied trial users are complete, the system will undergo clinical evaluation with five to 10 volunteers suffering from spinal cord injuries, which will help identify any problems and improve performance.
The researchers have developed a brain-neural-computer interface (BNCI) that converts electroencephalography (EEG) signals from the brain, or electromyography (EMG) signals from shoulder muscles, into electronic commands to control the exoskeleton.
To collect the signals, they used technology developed by Berlin-based eemagine Medical Imaging Solutions that consists of a cap covered in electrodes that amplifies and optimises signals before sending them to the neural network.
This contrasts with most other BNCI systems that either require electrodes to be placed directly into brain tissue, or take a long time to fit and use special gels to reduce the electrical resistance at the interface between the skin and the electrodes.
‘The “dry” EEG cap can be placed by the subject on their head by themselves in less than a minute, just like a swimming cap,’ said Ilzkovitz.
The BNCI signals also have to be filtered and processed before they can be used to control the exoskeleton. To achieve this, the Mindwalker researchers fed the signals into a ‘Dynamic recurrent neural network’, a processing technique capable of learning and exploiting the dynamic character of the BNCI signals.
‘This is appealing for kinematic control and allows a much more natural and fluid way of controlling an exoskeleton,’ said Ilzkovitz.
The exoskeleton itself can support a 100kg adult and is powerful enough to recover balance from instability created by the user’s torso movements during walking or a gentle push from the back or side.
It is relatively light, weighing less than 30kg without batteries, and uses springs fitted inside the joints that are capable of absorbing and recovering some of the energy otherwise dissipated during walking, in order to make it more energy efficient.
Unlike most exoskeletons that are designed to be balanced when stationary – a property that makes them heavy, slow and require additional support when moving – the Mindwalker uses a controlled loss of balance.
‘This approach is called “Limit-cycle walking” and has been implemented using model predictive control to predict the behaviour of the user and exoskeleton and for controlling the exoskeleton during the walk,’ said Ilzkovitz.
Space Applications Services also developed a virtual-reality training platform to allow new users to safely become accustomed to using the system before testing it out in a clinical setting.
Mindwalker was coordinated by Space Applications Services NV and received research funding under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
A man wears a brain-machine interface, equipped with electroencephalography Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
Behind a locked door in a white-walled basement in a research building in Tempe, Ariz., a monkey sits stone-still in a chair, eyes locked on a computer screen. From his head protrudes a bundle of wires; from his mouth, a plastic tube. As he stares, a picture of a green cursor on the black screen floats toward the corner of a cube. The monkey is moving it with his mind.
The monkey, a rhesus macaque named Oscar, has electrodes implanted in his motor cortex, detecting electrical impulses that indicate mental activity and translating them to the movement of the ball on the screen. The computer isn’t reading his mind, exactly—Oscar’s own brain is doing a lot of the lifting, adapting itself by trial and error to the delicate task of accurately communicating its intentions to the machine. (When Oscar succeeds in controlling the ball as instructed, the tube in his mouth rewards him with a sip of his favorite beverage, Crystal Light.) It’s not technically telekinesis, either, since that would imply that there’s something paranormal about the process. It’s called a “brain-computer interface.” And it just might represent the future of the relationship between human and machine.
Stephen Helms Tillery’s laboratory at Arizona State University is one of a growing number where researchers are racing to explore the breathtaking potential of BCIs and a related technology, neuroprosthetics. The promise is irresistible: from restoring sight to the blind, to helping the paralyzed walk again, to allowing people suffering from locked-in syndrome to communicate with the outside world. In the past few years, the pace of progress has been accelerating, delivering dazzling headlines seemingly by the week.
At Duke University in 2008, a monkey named Idoya walked on a treadmill, causing a robot in Japan to do the same. Then Miguel Nicolelis stopped the monkey’s treadmill—and the robotic legs kept walking, controlled by Idoya’s brain. At Andrew Schwartz’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh in December 2012, a quadriplegic woman named Jan Scheuermann learned to feed herself chocolate by mentally manipulating a robotic arm. Just last month, Nicolelis’ lab set up what it billed as the first brain-to-brain interface, allowing a rat in North Carolina to make a decision based on sensory data beamed via Internet from the brain of a rat in Brazil.
So far the focus has been on medical applications—restoring standard-issue human functions to people with disabilities. But it’s not hard to imagine the same technologies someday augmenting capacities. If you can make robotic legs walk with your mind, there’s no reason you can’t also make them run faster than any sprinter. If you can control a robotic arm, you can control a robotic crane. If you can play a computer game with your mind, you can, theoretically at least, fly a drone with your mind.
It’s tempting and a bit frightening to imagine that all of this is right around the corner, given how far the field has already come in a short time. Indeed, Nicolelis—the media-savvy scientist behind the “rat telepathy” experiment—is aiming to build a robotic bodysuit that would allow a paralyzed teen to take the first kick of the 2014 World Cup. Yet the same factor that has made the explosion of progress in neuroprosthetics possible could also make future advances harder to come by: the almost unfathomable complexity of the human brain.
From I, Robot to Skynet, we’ve tended to assume that the machines of the future would be guided by artificial intelligence—that our robots would have minds of their own. Over the decades, researchers have made enormous leaps in AI, and we may be entering an age of “smart objects” that can learn, adapt to, and even shape our habits and preferences. We have planes that fly themselves, and we’ll soon have cars that do the same. Google has some of the world’s top AI minds working on making our smartphones even smarter, to the point that they can anticipate our needs. But “smart” is not the same “sentient.” We can train devices to learn specific behaviors, and even out-think humans in certain constrained settings, like a game of Jeopardy. But we’re still nowhere close to building a machine that can pass the Turing test, the benchmark for human-like intelligence. Some experts doubt we ever will: Nicolelis, for one, argues Ray Kurzweil’sSingularity is impossible because the human mind is not computable.
Philosophy aside, for the time being the smartest machines of all are those that humans can control. The challenge lies in how best to control them. From vacuum tubes to the DOS command line to the Mac to the iPhone, the history of computing has been a progression from lower to higher levels of abstraction. In other words, we’ve been moving from machines that require us to understand and directly manipulate their inner workings to machines that understand how we work and respond readily to our commands. The next step after smartphones may be voice-controlled smart glasses, which can intuit our intentions all the more readily because they see what we see and hear what we hear.
The logical endpoint of this progression would be computers that read our minds, computers we can control without any physical action on our part at all. That sounds impossible. After all, if the human brain is so hard to compute, how can a computer understand what’s going on inside it?
It can’t. But as it turns out, it doesn’t have to—not fully, anyway. What makes brain-computer interfaces possible is an amazing property of the brain called neuroplasticity: the ability of neurons to form new connections in response to fresh stimuli. Our brains are constantly rewiring themselves to allow us to adapt to our environment. So when researchers implant electrodes in a part of the brain that they expect to be active in moving, say, the right arm, it’s not essential that they know in advance exactly which neurons will fire at what rate. When the subject attempts to move the robotic arm and sees that it isn’t quite working as expected, the person—or rat or monkey—will try different configurations of brain activity. Eventually, with time and feedback and training, the brain will hit on a solution that makes use of the electrodes to move the arm.
That’s the principle behind such rapid progress in brain-computer interface and neuroprosthetics. Researchers began looking into the possibility of reading signals directly from the brain in the 1970s, and testing on rats began in the early 1990s. The first big breakthrough for humans came in Georgia in 1997, when a scientist named Philip Kennedy used brain implants to allow a “locked in” stroke victim named Johnny Ray to spell out words by moving a cursor with his thoughts. (It took him six exhausting months of training to master the process.) In 2008, when Nicolelis got his monkey at Duke to make robotic legs run a treadmill in Japan, it might have seemed like mind-controlled exoskeletons for humans were just another step or two away. If he succeeds in his plan to have a paralyzed youngster kick a soccer ball at next year’s World Cup, some will pronounce the cyborg revolution in full swing.
Schwartz, the Pittsburgh researcher who helped Jan Scheuermann feed herself chocolate in December, is optimistic that neuroprosthetics will eventually allow paralyzed people to regain some mobility. But he says that full control over an exoskeleton would require a more sophisticated way to extract nuanced information from the brain. Getting a pair of robotic legs to walk is one thing. Getting robotic limbs to do everything human limbs can do may be exponentially more complicated. “The challenge of maintaining balance and staying upright on two feet is a difficult problem, but it can be handled by robotics without a brain. But if you need to move gracefully and with skill, turn and step over obstacles, decide if it’s slippery outside—that does require a brain. If you see someone go up and kick a soccer ball, the essential thing to ask is, ‘OK, what would happen if I moved the soccer ball two inches to the right?’” The idea that simple electrodes could detect things as complex as memory or cognition, which involve the firing of billions of neurons in patterns that scientists can’t yet comprehend, is far-fetched, Schwartz adds.
That’s not the only reason that companies like Apple and Google aren’t yet working on devices that read our minds (as far as we know). Another one is that the devices aren’t portable. And then there’s the little fact that they require brain surgery.
A different class of brain-scanning technology is being touted on the consumer market and in the media as a way for computers to read people’s minds without drilling into their skulls. It’s called electroencephalography, or EEG, and it involves headsets that press electrodes against the scalp. In an impressive 2010 TED Talk, Tan Le of the consumer EEG-headset company Emotiv Lifescience showed how someone can use her company’s EPOC headset to move objects on a computer screen.
Skeptics point out that these devices can detect only the crudest electrical signals from the brain itself, which is well-insulated by the skull and scalp. In many cases, consumer devices that claim to read people’s thoughts are in fact relying largely on physical signals like skin conductivity and tension of the scalp or eyebrow muscles.
Robert Oschler, a robotics enthusiast who develops apps for EEG headsets, believes the more sophisticated consumer headsets like the Emotiv EPOC may be the real deal in terms of filtering out the noise to detect brain waves. Still, he says, there are limits to what even the most advanced, medical-grade EEG devices can divine about our cognition. He’s fond of an analogy that he attributes to Gerwin Schalk, a pioneer in the field of invasive brain implants. The best EEG devices, he says, are “like going to a stadium with a bunch of microphones: You can’t hear what any individual is saying, but maybe you can tell if they’re doing the wave.” With some of the more basic consumer headsets, at this point, “it’s like being in a party in the parking lot outside the same game.”'
It’s fairly safe to say that EEG headsets won’t be turning us into cyborgs anytime soon. But it would be a mistake to assume that we can predict today how brain-computer interface technology will evolve. Just last month, a team at Brown University unveiled a prototype of a low-power, wireless neural implant that can transmit signals to a computer over broadband. That could be a major step forward in someday making BCIs practical for everyday use. Meanwhile, researchers at Cornell last week revealed that they were able to use fMRI, a measure of brain activity, to detect which of four people a research subject was thinking about at a given time. Machines today can read our minds in only the most rudimentary ways. But such advances hint that they may be able to detect and respond to more abstract types of mental activity in the always-changing future.
She left her job as an award-winning criminal courts reporter for The Palm Beach Post and went to the Yukon to see the northern lights. Then to Cyprus, to meet family that she never knew. She and her husband, John, took their children on trips on which her daughter got to try on wedding dresses and Susan got kissed by a dolphin.
She also got a new dog, put a splendid hut in her backyard and wrote a book. It's called Until I Say Good-Bye, and it's a memoir about the year she says she wanted to devote to joy — before she's claimed by ALS, a neuromuscular disorder often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease.
Susan was diagnosed in 2011, at the age of 44. In an interview conducted a few months ago, she tells NPR's Scott Simon that when she got the news, she felt "equally grateful for a life of perfect health and determined to face it with bravery." And a sense of humor, too: Asked how they broke the news to their children, Susan and John say, "Very carefully! Don't overwhelm them with bad news. Just a little bit at a time." John must help speak for his wife, since muscle damage caused by ALS has affected her speech.
She wrote the book — all 89,000 words of it — on an iPhone, using her right thumb, the only finger she had use of. It took three months, and she compares the task to climbing a mountain or finishing a triathlon. "First and foremost, I wrote the book for my family and friends to have, to jog their memories after I'm gone," she says. "I also realized that, as a storyteller, it's an amazing tale of twinning good and bad fortune. Themes that touch everyday people: friendship, devotion and discovery."
Not everything went as planned during Susan's year of joy. She went with her best friend to see the northern lights — but no lights were to be seen. "As you know, life isn't perfect," she laughs. "The lights did not show. Still had a wonderful time there."
For more than a decade, Susan Spencer-Wendel was a reporter for The Palm Beach Post.
Courtesy of Susan Spencer-Wendel
For more than a decade, Susan Spencer-Wendel was a reporter for The Palm Beach Post.
Courtesy of Susan Spencer-Wendel
For John, it's been an understandably difficult time. "Every day I wake up, and I feel sad. That's my first emotion," he says. "And then I roll over, and I look at Susan, and I realize that she's not allowing herself to feel that way, so I can't, and I don't." Susan adds that she has down moments but is "generally doing pretty darn well."
That upbeat attitude is reflected in the book, which is genuinely funny. She says she didn't want to write something maudlin. "If you think it's funny, then we've made it home," she says.
We checked in with Susan this week. Asked how she's doing, she wrote: "My pat answer is, as well as can be expected. My body and voice become weaker every single day, but my mind becomes mightier and more quiet. You do indeed hear more in silence."
Lynne Hibak, left, team co-ordinator Rob Baker and Laurie Fairweather play with iPads at the Garth Homer Society. Photograph by: DARREN STONE, Times Colonist
When Rob Baker handed an iPad to a woman at the Garth Homer Society recently, he expected to see her toss the computer aside in disgust.
The woman, who has a developmental disability as well as dementia, often resists changes to her daily routine.
So Baker was surprised when he plopped the tablet in front of her and watched as she immediately began doing a puzzle on the touch screen.
“You had never seen this side of her before,” he said. “She was beaming from ear to ear. It was amazing. Nobody expected that kind of reaction.”
Such breakthroughs have become more common among the society’s clients in recent months thanks to Baker’s initiative and the generosity of Butchart Gardens.
It started last year when Baker took his personal iPad to work with him at the society, which provides day programs and employment services to people with developmental disabilities.
Staff were so impressed with how clients responded to the new technology that the society decided to purchase 14 iPads with money that the Garth Homer Foundation receives from the wishing ponds at Butchart Gardens.
The effect was immediate.
People who struggled with fine motor skills or were unable to hold a pen or a paintbrush found they were able to write and draw more easily using the tablets.
“For me, I have issues with keyboards because the buttons are either too small or just awkward to operate,” said Laurie Fairweather, 41. “So with the iPad just having the keyboard as a touch [screen], there’s no right, no wrong, you just do it.
“I’m not great with computers, but I’m good with this.”
Lynne Hibak, 32, said the iPads have allowed her greater access to news and current events as well as a range of games and puzzles that help boost her spirits.
“When I’m down and depressed, that helps me lift myself back up again,” she said.
Others, unable to speak or hear, communicate what they want to eat or do by pointing to a picture on the screen.
“Now that there’s a visual cue, it’s so much easier,” Baker said. “Our breakthroughs tend to be quite small at first and it’s amazing to see. It opens up their world a whole bunch.”
In some cases, the tablets have been used to alleviate the anxiety of clients with autism who rely on routine. Staff create a visual schedule on the iPads with pictures that show what will happen throughout the day.
“It’s a picture of the bus they take. It’s a picture of the car that they get into, and it’s a picture of their face,” Baker said.
“If it means that they get in the van to go out in the community, whereas maybe they wouldn’t if they weren’t primed or they didn’t have that visual component, it’s a big deal.”
One man, in particular, had difficulty leaving the building until staff began using the tablets to show him his schedule for the day, said Colina Titus, director of client services. “Now, I would say 90 per cent of the time, it’s no problem.”
In future, staff hope to use the tablets to better assess how much people understand and what they are capable of doing.
“I think it levels the playing field for a lot of them,” Baker said.
“It gives them access to technology, it allows them to do things they could never do before, and it’s one more step to just being another part of the world.”
