Collaborative Virtual Learning for Assisting Children with Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

Communication through speech is a vital skill, an innate ability in most human beings intended to convey thoughts, needs, and it is the very foundation of literacy. However, some people find it as one of the challenges in their lives, particularly children with Cerebral Palsy. Children with such disability suffer from brain injuries before, during, and after birth that evidently affect their motor, cognitive, and linguistic skills. Some of the additional complexities may also cause hearing, visual, and speech impairments that further decrease their learning abilities. Their development milestones in learning is slower than a typical child, thus they require intensive personal drilling. It is believed that the cognitive skills in these children can be improved to enable them to lead a more productive life. That was an antecedent that strongly motivated us to develop the proposed Virtual Collaborative Learning Tool. It aims to assist the learning ability of the targeted children through a responsive avatar of their parents, teachers, or caretakers. A preliminary study was conducted on voluntary participants to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed learning model. The results showed 80% of the participants were able to answer questions provided within the program.