FYI Research:
Musical game designed by undergraduates helps blind toddler

He can already walk, but they want him to crawl, too. Carolina undergraduates Christa Wheeler and Sirin Yaemsiri know that their client, a blind Alamance County toddler, will need that skill as he grows up. CRAWL AND SEEK Applied science majors Christa Wheeler (left) and Sirin Yaemsiri have designed a musical game designed for blind toddlers that will help them to acquire important developmental skills.

Visually impaired children walk before they crawl, Yaemsiri said. "It's a defense mechanism. When you crawl, your head comes first and you're likely to bump into things with your head. So a lot of kids who can't see just start walking first, with their hands out in front of them." If children don't ever crawl, they may not develop the motor coordination and upper-body strength they need to use a cane and read Braille.

Motor-skill development is also delayed in blind children until they understand that sound has a physical source. "Kids who can see just look at things and say, `What's that?' and want to explore," Wheeler said. "But for visually impaired kids, if no sound is coming, they don't know what's there."

Wheeler and Yaemsiri, both applied-sciences majors, designed a game that encourages crawling and seeking the source of sound. They began their project for an assistive technology class taught by Gary Bishop, associate professor of computer science, and they continued work with the help of Richard Goldberg, assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department of the School of Medicine. Yaemsiri and Wheeler worked with their client's family, teacher and therapist to make the game fun, safe and useful. "The family was really happy with the toy when we delivered it," Goldberg said. "The final product is professionally done, outside and inside."

In action, their game spans a living room. Four toys are connected to a central control box by 15-foot cables. They're commercial toys you might find in any child's home, but these toys are special. Wheeler and Yaemsiri have wired and programmed them to play four familiar songs so that, when the child or parent presses the switch on any of the four toys, one of the toys begins to sing, drawing the child toward it.

When they delivered the game to their client last August, Yaemsiri and Wheeler watched him follow the music. Once he reached it, each singing toy itself was a tactile reward he could stop and enjoy -- but if he pressed that toy's switch, a different song began playing from another toy. In "ordered" mode, the music moves through the four toys in the same sequence each time, but the students also designed a "random" mode for more of a challenge.

Yaemsiri's and Wheeler's client especially liked "Stack and Surprise," one of the game's toys, which consists of several doughnut-shaped loops and a spindle to hold them. That toy's switch is near the top of the spindle. "He realized really fast that if he put a loop over the top, it would change songs every time," Wheeler said. When the music changed, the boy activated the switch again, laughing in the way of any toddler discovering a new toy.

A summer undergraduate research fellowship from Carolina's Office of Undergraduate Research and the Smallwood Foundation, supplemented by Goldberg's grant from the National Science Foundation, provided funding for this work.

Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle. Writer: Michelle Coppedge.
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