An Affective Computer-Mediated Learning for Persons with Motor Impairments

Abstract

In education, it is important to have good communication and interaction between educators and learners to promote a conducive learning environment. However, this is rather difficult for the children with motor impairments, such as children with Cerebral Palsy and Autism. Their learning problems arise due to their motor impairment coupled with speech and intellectual impairments. As a result, children with motor disabilities require more time and attention in learning. To assist the children’s learning, this chapter proposes an affective computer-mediated learning model which adapts to learners’ emotions where it has an educator representation (i.e. a virtual tutor) to deliver the learning materials and interact with a child in one-to-one learning. The virtual tutor communicates with the child by responding to his/her facial expressions. Post-intervention experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the affective computer-mediated learning model. The overall results showed that the proposed affective learning model is able to assist the children’s learning.