Young people use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems to meet their everyday communication needs. However, the successful integration of an AAC system into a child's life requires strong commitment and continuous support from parents and other family members. This article describes the development and evaluation of the Family Impact of Assistive Technology Scale for AAC Systems - a parent-report questionnaire intended to detect the impact of AAC systems on the lives of children with complex communication needs and their families. The study involved 179 parents and clinical experts to test the content and face validities of the questionnaire, demonstrate its internal reliability and stability over time, and estimate its convergent construct validity when compared to a standardized measure of family impact.
Individuals with profound motor, communication, and/or cognitive impairments may face difficulties describing subjective or experiential information through (i) speech, (ii) writing using a pencil and paper, and (iii) typing using a standard computer keyboard. Although patient-reported outcome measures and patient-reported experience measures can capture information about this group through proxy-report, we cannot solely rely on the responses of a single proxy for experiential information. Research methods to understand the experiences of individuals with profound motor, communication and cognitive impairments are not well defined in the literature. Purpose: To provide guidance to disability researchers on how to explore the subjective and personal experiences, of individuals with profound, motor, communication, and/or cognitive impairments. Three axes are proposed as important to the structure of the “recreated experiences” method: (i) informants, (ii) data collection methods, and (iii) analyses and reflexivity. Different types of information can be gained by involving different informant groups in research about the central person’s experience. Primary guardians can provide information about interpreting central persons’ indicators of expression and broad assessments of their personal life. Other adults can provide insight relative to the central person’s capacities outside of the primary guardian-central person dyad. Peers can provide insight about personal characteristics (i.e., personality traits). Utilizing different data collection methods can foster manifest and latent content to emerge. Analyses and reflexivity which involve diverse perspectives are essential to ensure findings are grounded in lived experience and professional lenses. The method highlights the importance of furthering research to understand the experiences of individuals who cannot traditionally self-express, which may influence possibilities for enhancing care, participation opportunities, and overall well-being.
This paper presents Building Better Together (BBT), an interdisciplinary project-based teaching and learning experience that facilitated a collaboration between the engineering and occupational therapy programs within Queen's, a Canadian University. We share the inter-professional and discipline-specific learning objectives, resources utilized, weekly course format, and outcomes of this experience. This project integrated different frameworks to develop competencies for students from both programs which included: an engineering design process, a clinical process framework used by occupational therapists, and an inter-professional framework. Feedback from students who participated in BBT is provided.
This paper presents the results of a student questionnaire after completion of the course “Building Better Together (BBT)”. BBT is an interdisciplinary project-based teaching and learning experience that facilitated a collaboration between the engineering and occupational therapy programs within Queen’s University. This project integrated different frameworks to develop competencies for students from both programs which included: an engineering design process, a clinical process framework used by occupational therapists, and an inter-professional framework. We share the responses from an inter-professional questionnaires that included feedback about discipline-specific learning objectives, resources utilized, weekly course format, and outcomes of this experience
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