Monday, January 27, 2014

Making Choices

A lot of people have been asking about Oaklynn's eye gaze device. She has the Tobii I-15. It looks like a regular computer monitor and it has a device on the bottom that tracks her eyes. When she looks at a picture for a certain amount of time, it speaks what she is looking at. She is doing REALLY well at starting to navigate through pages to let us know what she wants and she has only been using it for a couple months.

Just today she woke up from nap at 1:50pm. We usually eat lunch at 2pm but today we had speech therapy at 2pm which meant that she needed to wait to eat until after therapy. The therapist came in and Oaklynn's first word with using her device was, "HI". They then navigated through the device to do some work and learn some more pictures. When Oaklynn was asked if she wanted "more" or to "stop" (doing the current activity they were doing together), Oaklynn responded with, "Eat... Eat". I said, "yes, we should be eating now and you're probably hungry. We will eat as soon as therapy is over." Throughout the session she started not only saying "Eat" but then started saying, "Eat... Hurt... Eat". She was trying to tell us her stomach hurt because she was hungry. I got her a snack to eat during therapy and she smiled right away. Then when therapy was ending Oaklynn said, "drink".


I was so proud of her because everything was right on cue and so purposeful. She knew what she wanted and wouldn't stop asking until she got it.

Here is a video I took of her using it. I asked her what show she wanted to watch. If you see the blinking lights at the bottom of the device, those are used to track her eyes. She rocks and moves a lot so it can take her a couple minutes before she can make her body still enough to make a choice. This time it took her just under 2 minutes. I shortened the clip to show you just the part where she makes her choice.

You will notice that I ask her if she wanted Sesame Street after she made the choice. I do this to verify that was what she really wanted. As you can see in the video... it was clearly what she wanted.


I have sat down and used the device before and it is hard work. Using your eyes to navigate through pages and make choice makes you really exhausted! You would think it would be easier than using your fingers to choose things but it is not. I am SOOOO proud of her for all the hard work she does. She is my super star!

1 comment:

Brett and Heather said...

Wow! That is really cool! Good job oaklynn!!!! We miss you:)