Digital games and assistive technology: improvement of communication of children with cerebral palsy

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the frequency of occurrence of different forms of communication in nonspeaking children during activities with digital games. The participants in this study were three children with multiple disabilities, whose limitations were due to cerebral palsy. All the children had severe oral communication disabilities. Three digital games were developed by the Research Group of Computational Modeling of SENAI/CIMATEC for this population: Food Safety, Public Safety and Sustainable City. This research group has qualified people who have different areas of training and experience. From analysis of the footage, by recording the observation, it was possible to identify the occurrence of five categories of communication; vocal and non-verbal was the one that stood out. Additionally, we analyzed the expansion of the children´s communication individually in each session, thus allowing us to identify the ongoing progress of this variable. The digital games encouraged the use of different forms of communication in nonspeaking children with multiple disabilities resulting from cerebral palsy. This paper discusses the importance of analyzing the different possibilities of expression for these children with cerebral palsy in order to plan more effective treatments in the area Augmentative and Alternative Communication, using digital games and assistive technology.