Inclusive Cross-sensory Social Play: Towards a new paradigm of assistive technology for early development of blind and visually impaired children

Assistive technologies (ATs) help disabled individuals to perform functions that might be otherwise difficult or impossible. However, their design has been largely grounded in a medical view of disability, focusing on addressing the functional limitations imposed by medical conditions at the expense of accounting for the situated and social nature of meaning making between a disabled person and their environment. This has had inadvertent negative impact on the inclusion of disabled people in society, particularly for disabled children. This proposal is for interdisciplinary research that will radically change the way we design, engineer and evaluate assistive technologies for blind and visually impaired (BVI) children. It aims to move beyond a medical view of visual impairment by integrating notions of embodied and perceptual experience with social engagement and joint meaning making with peers. The aim is to carve new directions in technological research for inclusion by focusing on how interactions between disabled and non-disabled children can be facilitated with and through inclusive cross-sensory assistive technologies. I am proposing to investigate shared cross-sensory cognition between BVI and sighted children to ground an alternative framework for designing technologies that support more inclusive cross-sensory social play experiences. To do this, I will address key challenges in engineering novel cross-sensory shape-changing assistive technologies, understand cross-sensory cognition in BVI and sighted children, co-design conceptual models of cross-sensory social play experiences with stakeholders, and evaluate the effectiveness of a novel inclusive technological intervention for early child development in-situ. In doing so, I will establish the engineering, scientific and design foundations for a new paradigm for inclusive assistive technologies, which will revolutionise assistive technology research, and transform policy and practice around early child development and equity for disabled individuals in society.