More and more, technology enables our lives in ways that facilitate independence and connectivity and it seems like there’s an app for just about everything. For individuals aging in place, apps can help them stay organized, accomplish daily goals, or remotely link them to their adult children, a team of caregivers, or the support services they need in order to continue to live in their homes and thrive within their communities. Continue reading
The Traumatic Brain Injury Positive Strategies project (TIPS) is a collaborative effort among Assistech Systems LLC, the Center on Brain Injury Research and Training (CBIRT) at the University of Oregon, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Continue reading
The Routines app provides a way to show the steps needed to complete a task using text, images, or video. Use Routines when you want to support task accomplishment without needing to track progress data. You can create your own collection of routines or you can browse from a library of routines submitted by other Cognitopia users. And you can share your own routines to that same community library.
The Support Hub serves as a central point of communication for all of the people you support using the Cognitopia Platform. Located in the Dashboard menu, the Support Hub appears once you connect with someone in a supporting role, like a student, child, or co-worker. Continue reading
Goals progress can be tracked and measured in a number of different ways within Goal Guide. Here are some options and examples of how to do it:
Basic completion measures whether a goal was or was not met in yes or no format. For example, remembering to take medication every day. Did I remember to take my pills? Yes or no. Continue reading
When checked, Enable Assistance Rating activates an Independence Scoring Scale system* that tracks assistance at the task level. The data and type of assistance is tracked over time and can be used to monitor changes in levels of individual assistance. Continue reading
After graduating from high school, Michael Montgomery spent three years learning independent living skills through the 4J School District’s Community Living Program (CLP) in Eugene, Oregon. Diagnosed with autism at 18 months, Michael’s situation is typical among families receiving lifelong support services for their now-adult children. Continue reading
Raising three boys in rural Oregon in the late 1980s and 1990s, Trina began to first notice unique developmental behavior in her three-year-old son Clinton as he was just learning to read. “Clinton had learned all of the sounds, but phonetically he couldn’t put them together. Even today, Clinton is more typical in that he can read the dictionary and learn the definitions of words or small things, but he cannot read a novel.” Continue reading
Every word is part of living. So what if you are unable to talk? “What do you do to communicate?” People have been asking me that question since I was little. I tell them I use sign language for communicating with people. Then people ask me how do they understand you without an interpreter? Well, I have an iPad. That has a program called TouchChat. Continue reading
At Cognitopia, our goal is to develop a suite of essential web-based applications for students and adults with cognitive disabilities such as autism, intellectual disabilities, TBI, or learning disabilities, and for older individuals with cognitive decline due to normal aging, dementia, or stroke. Continue reading
When Morgan Flynn accepted a position as a long-term substitute teacher with Connections, a secondary transition program in Eugene, Oregon, he used the My Life e-portfolio app as a way to rapidly learn the strengths, accommodations, and interests of his students before his first day on the job. Continue reading
One of the key features of Cognitopia is that it is designed for maximum access by users with cognitive disabilities while also providing tools for teachers or parents to assist as necessary. Continue reading
Managing the Routines of Daily Living
Goal Guide helps individuals with cognitive disabilities set goals, track progress, and share their accomplishments with others. In the course of developing Goal Guide we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between goals and routines of daily living. Continue reading
Our work on cognitively accessible self-management applications has always relied on a participatory research approach that grounds development in the real-world life experience of individuals with disabilities and those who support them. We are fortunate to have a rich network of students and adults with disabilities, parents, and teachers who drive our iterative development approach by providing design input, using our beta version apps, and telling us how to improve them. Continue reading
March is Brain Injury Awareness Month. An annual campaign led by the Brain Injury Awareness Association of America (BIAA) and the United States Brain Injury Alliance, Brain Injury Awareness Month “provides a platform for educating the general public about the incidence of brain injury and the needs of people with brain injuries and their families.” Continue reading
When we started the MyLife project, our focus was on the development of a cognitively accessible, multimedia ePortfolio that would function as a kind of online résumé with a person-centered planning style. The end goal was to provide an intuitive, digital tool for students as end users that would let them document and share their educational, work, and personal experiences, and interests in a way that would foster more meaningful IEP participation and help with transition to adulthood. Continue reading
In a previous blog post, we showed how the Goal Guide app is being used by the Community Transition and Connections Program in Eugene 4J School District in Eugene, Oregon to foster independence and empower students to run a school store with minimal interaction, prompting, or supervision. Continue reading
“For people without disabilities, technology makes it better;
For people with disabilities, technology makes it possible…”
John D. Kemp
http://www.viscardicenter.org
Cognitopia exhibited and presented on its innovative platform of self-management applications for individuals with cognitive disabilities at the 2017 Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) conference in Orlando, Florida last month. ATIA is a gathering of people who research, create, manufacture, and use assistive technology — products, equipment, and systems that enhance learning, working, and daily living for persons with disabilities. Continue reading
In a student’s mind, assessment is synonymous with “testing,” and nothing causes anxiety like the prospect of having to take a test. Most educators realize, however, that effective formative assessment of progress, learning, and educational experiences go way beyond test taking. Measuring student progress over time should include formal and informal assessment procedures and it requires tools that capture the full range of students’ experiences, preferences, and goals. Continue reading
There was one moment using the Picture Planner visual calendaring program back in 2001 that particularly sticks out for me.
Through the Eugene 4J Schools Community Living Program, students have the opportunity to volunteer at a nearby community garden. Like many people with autism spectrum disorders, my students that year had very restricted diets. Many of the students refused to eat vegetables. One person had never eaten foods that were a different color other than white. Continue reading