Assistive Technologies and Microswitches for Promoting Constructive Engagement by Children with Developmental Disabilities

Children with developmental disabilities may fail to constructive engage with the surrounding world, due to their pathologies and clinical conditions. In fact, they are frequently reported as quite passive, isolated, presenting medical complications, dystonic movements, stereotypic behaviours, seizures, breath difficulties. Accordingly, they dispose of a very poor and limited behavioural repertoire, with few and sporadic capacities and opportunities to positively interact with the environmental events. Their situation may seriously hamper their social desirability, image and status, with negative consequences on their quality of life [1, 2]. Traditional rehabilitative programs within medical centres focused on sensorial stimulation and snoezelen rooms, providing them with positive (i.e. pleasant) environmental stimuli, aimed at enhancing their alert and vigilance, with positive consequences on their mood [3, 4]. The aforementioned interventions, however, do not improve participants' active role, relying them on caregivers and parents' assistance [5]. One way to overcome this issue is the use of assistive technologies (AT) [6]. Thus, by using technological supports (e.g. laptop, voca, speech generating devices) one may encourage positive participation of children involved, fostering their constructive engagement and reducing parents and caregivers' burden [7]. One solution within the AT approach is represented by microswitches [8]. Microswitches are electronic devices ensuring a person who exhibit a very low behavioural repertoire with an independent access to preferred (i.e. positive) stimulation. For instance, a child who is described with congenital encephalopathy and multiple (i.e. combination of sensorial, motor and intellectual disabilities) may be recruited for a microswitch-based program. That is, by producing eye blinking (i.e. adaptive response) recorded by an optic sensor fixed on a glasses frame the child could autonomously receive brief (e.g. 5-10 seconds) of preferred songs, through a control system unit [9]. Although no specific rules exist, one may define basic guidelines for a positive outcome concerning a microswitchbased intervention. Thus, the behavioural response should be already included in the child' behavioural repertoire, consequently easily exhibited by the participant (i.e. without any effort), detectable for the microswitch, produced by verbal and/or physical prompts. The stimulation provided contingently to the performing of the adopted response should be adequately motivating (i.e. it should compensate the response cost).