Multimodal video games can enhance the cognitive skills of children who are blind by allowing interaction with scenarios that would be unfeasible in their everyday life. To assist the identification of relevant interface and interaction issues when children who are blind are playing multimodal video games, we propose a Checklist for Usability Evaluation of Multimodal Games for Children who are ...

Humans are hypothesized to have evolved brain regions that enable them to acquire language. Surprisingly, recent research with blind adults suggests that brain regions in the occipital lobe, which evolved for vision, can take on language functions. We examined when and why occipital areas develop language functions. We used fMRI to measure brain activity during story comprehension in nine blind...

introduction: in 1995, the world health organization (who) estimated that there were 37.1 million blind people worldwide. it has subsequently been reported that 110 million people have severely impaired vision, hence are at great risk of becoming blind. watkins predicted an annual increase of about two million blind worldwide. this study was designed to investigate the causes of blindness and l...

Developmental setback in children initially thought to be of normal cognitive potential is a serious complication of severe visual impairment; the prevalence, diagnostic specificity, clinical presentation, and factors that contribute to its genesis require systematic investigation. The findings are reported of a retrospective case review over a 15 year period of children attending the developme...

UNLABELLED Plasticity in the visual cortex of blind individuals provides a rare window into the mechanisms of cortical specialization. In the absence of visual input, occipital ("visual") brain regions respond to sound and spoken language. Here, we examined the time course and developmental mechanism of this plasticity in blind children. Nineteen blind and 40 sighted children and adolescents (4...

the infomax algorithm is a popular method in blind source separation problem. in this article an extension of the infomax algorithm is proposed that is able to separate mixed signals with any sub- or super-gaussian distributions. this ability is the results of using two different nonlinear functions and new coefficients in the learning rule. in this paper we show how we can use the distribution...

Vision 2020 The World Heath Organization and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness in 1999 jointly launched “Vision 2020—the right to sight.” This ambitious programme, to eliminate unnecessary blindness and promote good vision throughout the world, includes the control of blindness in children as one of its first five priorities. Given that there are estimated to be 45 millio...

Airway epithelial cells (AECs) are important in asthma as they are the first cells to encounter pathogens/allergens. In children, AECs can be obtained using a "blind" nonbronchoscopic technique through an endotracheal tube. However, due to the increasing use of laryngeal masks the number of children in whom this technique is applicable has become limited. Recently, the present authors began to ...

Gesture is widely regarded to play an important role in communication, both in conjunction with and independent of speech. Indeed, gesture is known to develop even before the onset of spoken words. However, little is known about the communicative conditions under which gesture emerges. The aim of this study was to explore the role of vision in early gesturing. We examined gesture development in...