Innovation at the service of disability

The Cognihelp project centres on Gradior, a multi-media system for evaluating and rehabilitating people with brain damage and other cognitive disorders. It was developed by the Fundacion Intras, a non-profit foundation set up to research health-based, social and educational approaches to mental health. Cognihelp's mission has been to transfer Gradior from its original Spanish into English and French linguistic and cultural environments.

Most Innovation projects are designed to help conventional.'forprofit' enterprises. But in the Cognihelp(l) and Sheltered Workshops(2) projects, it is non-profit organisations that are transferring new technologies and methods, using innovation to open the world to peoPle with disabilities.

Running on a PC equipped with a touch screen, Gradior enables the professional clinician to administer interactive game like exercises to test and train patients' cognitive functions such as memory, attention and perception. In one type of memory exercise, for example, an object will appear on the screen. After a delay, the same object will reappear along with other objects in a picture. The patient has to touch the pre-identified object.

Contents open
Behind the scenes, Gradior performs the necessary support tasks, including exercise assessments, statistical analyses and record keeping. But its chief innovation lies in the facility it offers clinicians for designing exercises tailored to individual patients. An elderly man suffering from dementia can be treated as the retired Scottish fisherman he actually is. The objects that will be presented to him in exercises can be preselected. For instance, an image of the local port or a photograph of a close relative will be more patient-friendly than a picture of a universal cup and saucer. The clinician needs no prior computer-programming skills.

"This technique, which we call 'contents open’, gives the clinician a unique degree of flexibility when designing exercises," says Pablo G6mez, managing director of Fundaci6n Intras.

For transfer to other countries, G6mez formed an alliance with a French partner, the Centre de Recherche d'Etude et de Formation (CREF) and a British partner based in the Psychology Department at the University of Wales, Bangor, which he found by searching the internet.

The French and British partners have assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the Spanish version of Gradior. At the Fundaci6n Intras, a team of psychologists and computer programmers have been busy making the necessary changes. Soon, G6mez hopes to sign a commercial licence agreement with the University of Wales for exploitation in the UK, and to begin demonstrating the French version to medical software distributors in France.

Social integration
Sheltered Workshops shares Cognihelp's interest in interactive play and its potential for widening social inclusion. It stems from a unique series of 'international creativity workshops' organised and run for Unesco as part of the United Nations World Decade for Cultural Development (1988 to 1998) by Fordern durch Spielmit- tel, a German non-profit organisation.

In each case, an international group of designers and other experts came to stay at a residence for people with special needs (PSN). For a fortnight, they designed new and better toys through direct interaction with end-users -the residents.

"The Sheltered Workshops project gave us the chance of finding a more solid basis for what we did in the Unesco ...

(1) IN310431 - Application of new computer based technology for cognitive rehabilitation (Cognihelp).

(2) IN310581 -Production of innovative play products in sheltered workshops (Sheltered Workshops).

workshops, to transform an approach into a method, "says Beate Punge, who co-ordinates the project at Fordern.

Underlying the project are two fundamental needs. First, toys that have rehabilitative value for PSN are scarce and expensive. This is why Fordern publishes DIY-style books showing how toys developed in its workshops can be made. It is also one of the reasons for the creativity workshops which constitute one of Sheltered Workshop’s main components.

In the course of the project, three have been held, in Sweden, Italy and the UK-each organised by a different project partner. Through experimental variations on the theme of the Unesco workshops, they have added several new toy designs to the existing repertoire, and amply demonstrated the transferability of the creativity-workshop model. "The second need," says Punge, "is for processes centred more firmly on participation and social integration." Hence another element of the project, the integration workshop. Here, the integration of experts and PSN has gone a step further. One basic toy was selected by the workers and developed along different lines. The PSN workers participated fully as designers in their own right. The resulting prototypes are now being tested and should soon be integrated into the sheltered workshop’s ordinary manufacturing process, again with the close involvement of the PSN workers. This degree of integration was new, even to Fordern, but has been a surprising success for workers and decision-makers alike.

Sheltered Workshops held its final creativity workshop in July but its success is inspiring new ones further afield. A group of participants in previous Unesco workshops will hold the first Indian creativity workshop in January 2001.

Source: Invention Intelligence, September-October 2001, ISSN 0970-0056, Page no. 239.