Play Timocco with Your Eyes!

This week Sarit Tresser talks about using Timocco with eyes movements: Timocco’s virtual environment is based on motion. The system encourages activation of the hands, enhancement in range of motion, and enhancement of different motors skills (as described in previous posts). Nevertheless along the way, I was exposed to children with a wide variety of abilities and countless challenges, which increases the need to provide an answer for those children, that have difficulties with hand motion, and sometimes it’s impossible for them to control the motion. Many parents were frustrated with their function of the child’s hand use, and looked for solutions that enabled the child to communicate and act with the use of eye movement.

The technology of eye tracking has existed for many years, but until recently this has only been used for marketing, and hasn’t been used as a significant accessibility tool for people with disabilities.
Recently, the Tobii Company took up the challenge and created contents for children who are having difficulties working with their hands, but capable to navigate the computerized environment by their eye movements only.
Naturally, Timocco, who aims to give an answer to every child with a special need, teamed up with Tobii to offer the experience and tools. In addition, Tobii is an excellent tool when dealing with clinical work, research and developing, and close accompanying of the therapists, the children and the families.

Since the existent systems for eye tracking are in the beginning as far as it relates to the developmental or rehabilitation field, the tools for collecting evidences and analysis are under development. These is where Timocco gets in with the tools that have been provided recently for collecting evidence, and analysis, and present them in a friendly user interface that enables the parent/ teacher or therapist to follow the child’s performances, identify trends in his function, and build a therapeutic plan based on graphs that show the child’s progress over time.

Parallel, the advanced management system, Timocco is also assisting Tobii to enrich the amount of activities that are available for those children. It is paramount to create significant content when we are facing the issue of children with complex motor disabilities, because the variety of activities those children can be part of, is extremely limited. That’s why over the past few months, Timocco developed 30 new games that are specified for those children and offer them a variety of learning opportunities and an enriched environments. The games are divided into two kits: “Start Learning” and “Start Playing”. Each game can be played by eye tracking, a regular mouse and of course, by Timocco’s balls for practice ranges of motor and improvement motors skills.