Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Autism: Gillian Hayes' work at the Social and Technology Action Research Group:

Here is an update about the work of Gillian Hayes, an assistant professor at the School of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine. Much of her work focuses on technology that supports young people with autism spectrum disorders. Hayes received her Ph.D. from Georgia Tech:  Documenting and Understanding Everyday Activities through the Selective Archiving of Live Experiences pdf  (2007).

In the YouTube video below, Gillian Hayes discusses her work with technology with young people with autism spectrum disorders.


Photos from the STAR website:

The STAR group is researching the SenseCam, too!


About the SenseCam, from the Microsoft Research SenseCam Website:

"SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images."

New study proves that Microsoft's sensory innovation aids memory recall
Technology Review Article 
Images from Microsoft Research:


The SenseCam application has the potential to be a resource for people who have developmental delays, traumatic brain injury, severe attention deficits, and autism spectrum disorders. It would be a great tool for special educators, occupational and speech/language therapists, and rehabilitation specialists.
SenseCam Videos      Research and Publications


RELATED

STAR:: Social and Technology Action Research Group
Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Autism

Technology helps teach kids with autism: Informatics assistant professor designs computer devices to aid instruction, record-keeping.

Monibi, M., Hayes, G.R. Mocotos: Mobile Communication Tools for Children with Special Needs. Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children, pages 121-124 ACM, 2008

Sen H. Hirano, Michael T. Yeganyan, Gabriela Marcu, David H. Nguyen, Lou Anne Boyd, Gillian R. Hayes vSked: Evaluation of a System to Support Classroom Activities for Children with Autism. To Appear In CHI 2010 (Atlanta, GA, 2010).(pdf)

"Particularly interesting for students with autism who often struggle with group work and social interaction, we also uncovered the potential for these types of interactive classroom technologies to support these challenging focus areas."

vSked

Note:  I think the following website contains the vSked prototype application. I poked around the site and it looks teacher-friendly. 

vSked Teachers View

The Future of Interactive Technology: Links to VentureBeat's series of articles

Put your finger on it: The future of interactive technology
Matt Marshall, 8/12/09

"Touch" technology for desktop computing finally taking off
Al Monro (CEO, NextWindow) 8/28/09



Speech, touchscreen--been there, done that. What's the user interface of tomorrow?
9/2/09 Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft)

How phones emerged as main computing devices, and why user interface will improve
Andrew Hsu (Synaptics) 8/24/09

SOMEWHAT RELATED

Playing Tetris could be good for your brain, study says




Mind Research Network
BRAIN IMAGING SHOWS PLAYING TETRIS LEADS TO BOTH BRAIN EFFICIENCY AND THICKER CORTEX

"Over a three-month period, adolescent girls practiced Tetris, a computer game requiring a combination of cognitive skills. The girls who practiced showed greater brain efficiency, consistent with earlier studies. Compared to controls, the girls that practiced also had a thicker cortex, but not in the same brain areas where efficiency occurred."

"We showed that practice on a challenging visuospatial task has an impact on the structure of the cortex, which is in keeping with a growing body of scientific evidence showing that the brain can change with stimulation and is in striking contrast with the pervasive and only-recently outmoded belief that our brain’s structure is fixed,” said Dr. Sherif Karama, a co-investigator at the Montreal Neurological Institute. This study, published in the open-access journal BMC Research Notes, is one of the first to investigate the effects of practice in the brain using two imaging techniques. The girls completed both structural and functional MRI scans before and after the three-month practice period, as did girls in the control group who did not play Tetris. A structural MRI was used to assess cortical thickness, and a functional MRI was used to assess efficient activity."