Sigueme

Educational App for enhancing attention and communication person with autism

Follow Me is an educational tool that can promote and enhance the development of visual-perceptual processes and cognitive-visual and building the access to the meaning of the words, in people with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability associated. This project gives meaning and orientation to perform surgery to people who do not have access to reading and writing, because his perceptive abilities - visual cognitive not allow.

We present six phases from baseline stimulation to acquire meaning from videos, photographs, drawings and pictograms, including in the final stages of categorization and association activities through games.

The project has been developed by the Orange Foundation and the University of Granada, with the pedagogical counseling Juan Martos. They have collaborated in implementing the special school of the Sisters Hospitallers of Granada and the company Everyware.

Some of the objective of the program are:

Encourage fixation and visual tracking. Improved baseline visual attention to stimuli. Adjust the image presentation sequence of each phase to normal development. The child looks at the screen, eyes directed to a specific point of it, remains looking a given time, flashes, focuses its attention to a specific image without being distracted by funds. It is complemented by sound stimuli. Later visual attention focuses on representations of objects and faces in real videos.

Develop observation skills, using simple pictures, clear, known, easily observed and progressive difficulty. Having previous experiences adapting to its perceptive and relating them to their everyday experience: classroom, playground, etc..

Enhancing the mental representation and language comprehension in children through visual and auditory images. It incorporates video images in real-world objects and faces of people to recognize them. We work discrimination associating images and real objects and verbal labels for two-dimensional representation.

Improving control-related behavioral stereotypies, decentration problems, motivation and interest in the game, general stimulation, decreased hyperactivity.

The application has been designed following educational strategies that can help the user with ASD to develop those cognitive structures that are necessary to compensate for the difficulties in learning, some of these strategies, as described by Rita Jordan, are:

- Visuals stable

- Predictable visual trajectories

- Repeated sequences in order to create consistency and facilitate advance

- Predictable physical environments. Corresponding scenarios are part of everyday life

- Helps to convert sequential experiences around meaning

- Starting of meaningful learning. The application allows the possibility to adapt the images, music and videos to the user's preferences. Customizing scenarios, environments and objects.