Better assess the needs of people with multiple disabilities

Date:
April 26, 2022
Source:
Universite' de Gene`ve
Summary:
How do we assess the needs of people with severe multiple
disabilities? Unable to communicate verbally and physically, this
population has nearly no possibility of expressing itself. Thanks
to eye-tracking technology, a team has succeeded in identifying
and evaluating certain perceptive and social-emotional abilities
in nine children and adolescents with multiple disabilities,
opening the way to personalized care.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
How do we assess the needs of people with severe multiple
disabilities? Unable to communicate verbally and physically, this
population has nearly no possibility of expressing itself. They are
therefore sometimes considered as "untestable" by the scientific and
medical community. Thanks to eye-tracking technology, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has succeeded in identifying and evaluating certain perceptive and social-emotional abilities in nine children and adolescents with multiple disabilities, opening the way to personalized
care. These results can be found in the journal Plos One.


========================================================================== People with multiple disabilities include people with a combination
of severe intellectual and motor deficiencies, to which are added
various associated medical conditions. The symptoms are expressed in
very different ways depending on the individual, but all of them are
in a situation of extreme dependence for the execution of the tasks of
daily life (washing, dressing, eating). Unable to communicate through
language or sensory-motor signs, these people have practically no way
to express themselves.

How can their needs and preferences be assessed and personalized
assistance provided? Until now, it was often considered that this
population was "untestable" and that this type of information could
only be collected indirectly through the observations of external
evaluators (parents, educators, caregivers). This is generally based on questionnaires measuring certain behaviors in terms of frequency ("never"
vs. "always") or intensity ("not at all" vs. "a lot").

Making the eyes "speak" Research led by Edouard Gentaz, a professor at
the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of
Geneva (UNIGE) and at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, shows the opposite. His team demonstrates that eye-tracking -- which allows the
recording of eye movements in real time -- is a promising tool for the
direct evaluation of social-emotional and perceptive abilities in this population. Indeed, the ability to look is one of the only behavioral
cues frequently preserved in individuals with multiple disabilities.

"Eye-tracking has been used for many years to assess the early abilities
of babies, who are not yet able to speak and do not yet have fine
motor skills," explains Edouard Gentaz, the study's last author. At the
request of the medico- educational institute La Cle' des Champs, based
in Saint-Cergues (F), the UNIGE scientists tested reapetedly nine single
cases with severe multiple disabilities aged 6 to 16, and recorded their
eye movements in response to different visual stimuli.

Six abilities assessed "With eye-tracking, we observed that these children
were sensitive to what they saw and that each one of them had his or her
own visual preferences," says Thalia Cavadini, assistant professor in
the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, first author of the
study and grant holder of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Several pairs of images and scenes were presented to these children
in order to assess six social-emotional abilities through visual
preferences for: biological or non-biological movements, socially
salient or non-social scenes, facial area of the eyes or mouth, joy or
anger, objects of shared attention or not, pro-social or anti-social
behaviors. Researchers compared the amount of time each participant spent looking at each image. They then compared these results with those of
a control group of 32 two-year-olds without multiple disabilities.

Developing "Serious games" "This method enabled us to highlight
unsuspected individual skills in each of the nine children tested,
such as the ability to orient oneself preferentially towards human
and socially salient stimuli or the ability to direct one's attention
towards the object that another person is looking at. This discovery
opens the way to personalized stimulation and care devices, as long as
the ability to look is preserved, which is not the case for all people
with multiple disabilities," explains Edouard Gentaz.

Thanks to this work, eye-tracking is now a reliable device for
assessing certain perceptual and social-emotional abilities of people
with multiple disabilities, while taking into account their individual characteristics. On the basis of this research, "serious games" -- video
games with an educational or communicative purpose -- adapted to each
child tested are also being developed. The objective, in the long term,
would be to establish a more fluid communication with this population.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Universite'_de_Gene`ve. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Related Multimedia:
* Eye-tracking_of_various_facial_expressions ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Thalia Cavadini, Yannick Courbois, Edouard
Gentaz. Eye-tracking-based
experimental paradigm to assess social-emotional abilities in
young individuals with profound intellectual and multiple
disabilities. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (4): e0266176 DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0266176 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220426101729.htm

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