The iPad has the potential to increase communication skills in kids living with severe vision problems and become a “life-changing therapy” tool, according to research conducted at the University of Kansas.
New findings reveal that Apple’s best selling tablet device may have the ability to improve cortical visual impairment, a severe neurological disorder resulting from brain damage that prevents children from interpreting visual information.
Muriel Saunders, assistant research professor at the University of Kansas’s Life Span Institute, was conducting a study about how children respond to adaptive switches – a tool that teaches kids with disabilities cause and affect skills needed for early language development – when her assistant asked to use an iPad to gauge interaction.
“We gave 15 toddlers between the ages of three and four with cortical visual impairment an iPad to play with and were completely shocked with the results,” Saunders told TechNewsDaily. “Children with the disorder don’t usually look directly at people and objects, but they were completely drawn to the light of the iPad and could interact with objects on the screen.”
