PDA Yay
Published July 27, 2009 @ 04:58PM PT
An article from the Star Tribune (MN) iPods may help Asperger's kids navigate life mostly highlights the use of iPods for social prompts (interesting correlation perhaps with the Scientific American story on verbal prompts for AS which deserves a post all its own). It may be fair to expand the scope of usefulness to Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), prompts, and the autistic spectrum in general.
A PDA with calendar, tasks, and reminder capabilities can be great for those of us with little sense of time. Many organizational programs have graphical capabilities for people who don't resonate well with numbers or words. Notes, tasks, and reminders also can also substitute for short term memory. The awesomeness of PDAs with a built in GPS is invaluable for those of us with a tendency to confuse easily, especially in new places. PDAs that take pictures can help with memory, navigation, orienting in new places, all sorts of things. And PDA applications with favorite sights, sounds, and games can soothe the nerves. Best of all for anyone with executive function issues is that there is only one does-it-all device to keep track of, not a ton of separate calendars, notebooks, devices, etc. to lose, forget about, and curse.
As a long-time PDA user (as soon as they became marginally affordable over a decade ago), I am quite serious when I tell people my executive function skills are present not in my brain, but in my PDA.
The obvious point here is that a PDA can be an invaluable piece of assistive technology for autism-specific "stuff." Plus, PDAs are mainstream, even "cool," so there's no weird looks for using one.
The less obvious point is that it can be beneficial to think about what sort of tool can give a person a skill they don't otherwise have, rather than pouring energy into trying to find a way to make that person have the skill unassisted. What actually works is more important than appearances.
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Comments (2)
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Dora is committed to improving quality of life for individuals on the autistic spectrum--including herself! She is Co-director of the Academic Autistic Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education and a member of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network's Board of Directors.
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I work with many kids on autism spectrum, and the use of ipods/PDAs has really made a fantastic impact on many of the school aged kids that I work with (not to mention their parents). I just wanted to share an an iphone application that quite a few of our parents are using now- it's called iCommunicate. You can find it in the iTunes store. It allows people to take pictures using their iphones (there are also pictures that come with the app) and turn them into customized storyboards/visual schedules. Thanks again for calling attention to such a useful piece of technology for so many people!
Posted by Sheryl Man on 07/28/2009 @ 04:36AM PT
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Thanks back for sharing about iCommunicate!
Posted by Dora Raymaker on 07/28/2009 @ 04:31PM PT
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