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Undergraduates develop game to encourage blind toddler to crawl

CHAPEL HILL -- Christa Wheeler flips the switch on a small black box connected to four toys, and the unmistakable beginning notes of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" emanate from one of the toys.

But which toy? That’s part of the fun – and challenge – for the visually impaired toddler who will receive this orientation game. The four toys are individually attached to the box by 15-foot cables, and the game’s goal is to propel the toddler to crawl toward the music, experience the tactile features of the toy containing the sound and activate a button that will send the sound – and, hopefully, the curious toddler – to another toy across the room.

Wheeler and Sirin Yaemsiri, seniors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, created this orientation game from a research project begun last spring; they, along with mentor Dr. Richard Goldberg, recently gave the game to a 16-month-old Alamance County boy with severe visual impairment.

"He had the biggest smile on his face as he played with the toys and listened to the music," said Yaemsiri.

As he plays with the game regularly, said Wheeler, he’ll make more cause-and-effect connections between his actions and the change in music. "The sound is incentive for him to move."

The project started spring semester when Dr. Gary Bishop assigned his class the project of creating a device to assist people with a disability.

"Our class was really interesting," said Bishop, an associate professor in the department of computer science. "We had 22 students studying assistive technology and doing projects in small teams. Half of the students in the class were women. That’s unprecedented in the computer science department."

Yaemsiri and Wheeler were aware of projects completed by students of Goldberg, an assistant professor in UNC’s School of Medicine’s department of biomedical engineering – in one case, students had modified a miniature car for a child with cerebral palsy. Goldberg encouraged them to continue work on their orientation game, and under his mentorship, Yaemsiri and Wheeler secured a UNC summer undergraduate research fellowship to continue their work. These fellowships are administered through UNC’s Office of Undergraduate Research and supported with funding from the Smallwood Foundation and other sources.

Goldberg also had a grant from the National Science Foundation to supplement their fellowship.

Their funding secured, the students then had to take their blueprint and turn it into a game that would actually engage a visually impaired toddler. Yaemsiri and Wheeler, who are majoring in applied sciences within UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, worked with the family who were to receive the toy, as well as his teacher from the Governor Morehead School’s Preschool Program for visually impaired children in Raleigh, and an orientation and mobility therapist.

When correctly implemented, the toys (each commercially manufactured but adapted for the project) would be placed several feet apart, with the control box under a sofa or otherwise inaccessible to the child.

The toys have tactile features, and the control box, which holds switches for four different songs, allows for a "random" or "ordered" sequence. "In the ordered mode, the child becomes familiar with the orientation of the room by hearing the toys activate in a predetermined order," Wheeler and Yaemsiri wrote in their research report.

After learning the ordered sequence, the child may find the random mode an interesting challenge.

Because a toddler was to use the game, extensive detail had to go into ensuring that the game was completely safe. And that it would intrigue a child. And that it was durable, able to withstand a child’s eager "thwap, thwap" on the toy’s sound buttons.

Their goal in designing the game was two-fold, said Yaemsiri. "One was to encourage crawling. The second was to encourage ‘reach on sound.’ The game won’t teach a visually impaired toddler to reach on sound as is. Therapy is necessary to help the toddler understand that sound has a physical source and a corresponding tactile stimulus.

"We wanted to emphasize this connection by associating songs with tactilely stimulating toys."
Said Wheeler: "We had to make sure that the wiring was inaccessible to the child, so we had to place everything in the bottom of the toys."

The game was complicated to create – involving circuitry, audio tapers, toggle switches and other wiring. Evidence of the project’s difficulty is apparent in the technical description from their report of the "ordered mode": "When a switch is pressed, a clock pulse is sent to the Mod-4 counter and the D-flip flop. The count advances by one. The flip flop latches the current count. The demux reads the count and outputs music to the correct toy."

Goldberg said the biomedical lab had an appearance of controlled chaos many days – a good sign, he added.

"It was great to walk into the lab one day and find Christa and Sirin drilling holes into the control box, testing and soldering electrical circuits, and sewing up toys after they had inserted speakers and switches into them."

To Goldberg, Yaemsiri and Wheeler, the biggest satisfaction was not in the "gee-whiz" nature of pioneering technology as undergraduates but in that technology’s ability to make a positive difference in the life of an Alamance County toddler.

"Right now," said Yaemsiri, "the client isn’t ‘reaching on sound.’ He is happy just to sit at one of the toys and press the red button over and over again – clearly he sees the connection between pressing the button and changing the songs.

"The next step is for him to press the button and crawl toward the toy that is playing the music – this is ‘reach on sound.’ Fortunately, he has a couple of therapists who will work with him who will work with him on this."

Yaemsiri and Wheeler plan to keep in touch with the family, looking forward to that moment when they watch the client "thwap" his toy and rush forward to find the music.

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Photo note: To view a photo of Wheeler and Yaemsiri with the orientation game they created, click on http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/students/wheeler_yaemsiri.jpg

Note: For more information on other related research at UNC, contact Dr. Gary Bishop at gb@cs.unc.edu or Dr. Richard Goldberg at rlg@bme.unc.edu.

News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu