Visual Impact Phase II: Using Cloud-based Technology to Support Activities of Daily Living and Other Learning Needs to Facilitate Independence for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities

This project develops a cloud-based system for managing and delivering “on demand” activity prompts to individuals with intellectual disabilities along with a comprehensive, automated reporting system to enable reliable remote notifications to facilitate monitoring of task compliance. Pictures, audio, and video prompts can be delivered anywhere via the cloud to a Visual Impact cognitively accessible prompting app running on mobile devices including the iPhone, iPad, and Android smart phones/tablets. This enables step-by-step task prompting to be accessed independently at the places and times where it is needed. Phase II involves the continued development and evaluation of a comprehensive Visual Impact system, resulting in a tool that allows parents, teachers, and other caregivers to develop, manage, and share multimedia instructional training tasks to users in remote locations on-demand. This project also further develops and evaluates notification features to allow staff to remotely monitor task compliance and take corrective actions as needed. This study continues research on the independent usability of the system, to help validate the efficacy of the system for increasing independent and accurate task performance by students and adults with intellectual and other cognitive disabilities, and to evaluate the benefits and cost efficiencies of remote monitoring of task compliance.