ALF have been contacted by The Ida Institute, with which we starting a collaboration, regarding Nele, MSC Medialogy Student at AAU, whom are finishing her masters thesis in the fall.
She would like to get in contact with SLTs to text her developed tool, which focuses primarily on helping the professional to explore the child’s perspective by helping to facilitate communication through applying a more narrative and playful approach.
More specifically, she is interested in investigating how incorporating IVR (Immersive Virtual Reality) could potentially provide a new way for eliciting conversation between the HCP and the child, as part of a paediatric hearing care appointment. The tool also features elements from Ida tools, such as My World and Living Well for Tweens, to establish relevant communication environments and help explore the child’s ambivalence.
At this moment she is looking for 2-3 hearing care professionals that would be interested in taking part in the testing, to establish the potential benefits, and limitations of this type of a tool, as part of a real-life appointment. Her current target group is school children between the ages of 6-10.
As her deadline for handing in her thesis is already in mid-September, she would like to be able to test already in August. She is of course aware that this is a little rushed, but she still hope it’s possible. The testing procedure per audiologist-child couple, should not take longer than 40 minutes, including the pre-test and post-test interviews.
The tool itself consists of two parts:
(1) The (tablet) app that aims to help the HCP and the child together establish the specific communication environment to explore, identify possible challenges, and provide support for the HCP for establishing appropriate communication strategies.
(2) The Virtual Reality scenarios featuring 3 different 360-video environments (playground, home and school) for the child to explore to elicit the conversation during the appointment. (The VR-scenarios will be only using a smartphone and a light mobile head-mounted-display (HMD) and does not require any any additional complex equipment.)
I have additionally attached images of the current state of the prototype of the (tablet) app, that hopefully can illustrate the tool a little better. That being said, a number of elements in the prototype will be adjusted and re-designed before the testing, so this is by no means the ‘final’ version.
Please feel free to let me know if her have any questions, or if this brief explanation failed to cover some important details regarding the testing or the tool itself.
Her email address is neka@idainstitute.dk, but she can also be contacted via gmail at nelekadas@gmail.com, and additionally reached by phone: 42760777
Communication and testning will be mainly communicating English, but she can also speak and understand Danish on an upper-intermediate level – so test could also be conducted in Danish. She would however need to know which language would be used during an appointment, so she could make the necessary language-adjustments to the app.
Good Luck Nele.
frem ALF and the webmaster
