Abstract
Drawing on our experiences of daily life-support activities for severely disabled children, we developed the contents of a hiragana script study as a tool for developing their communication skills. The participants were 19 children, 3 with severe mental and physical disorders and 16 with intellectual disability. We investigated the efficacy of these contents through visualization of the participants’ respective sightlines. Children who used our contents ranged from 10 months old to second-year high school students. Study periods ranged from a minimum of 3 minutes and 25 seconds (terminated due to mucous plugging) to a maximum of 35 minutes and 4 seconds with a mean of 18 minutes and 11 seconds—the 10-month-old child surpassed the mean at 21 minutes and 24 seconds. The children watched a video without sleeping, crying, or becoming upset and were engaged in the quiz. Although three children with mental disorders were, in addition to their primary disease, diagnosed with irreversible coma (brain death) due to a catastrophic event, scattered gaze points and attention points were also confirmed for these children. These points were also confirmed for the 10-month-old child, who has spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type I. From our results, we ascertained four uses (positive effects) for our contents: (1) as an assessment tool, (2) as a study (learning) tool, (3) as a visual-functions assessment and training tool, and (4) for assessment and learning while having fun with a sense of play. However, as our study involves eye movements, we will need to use an even more accurate eye tracker in future research. Our results suggest that our contents can easily be used for line-of-sight detection and assessment and can serve as a tool that can be an enjoyable experience for children.
