About a week ago I described a new project we had underway called "Domino". Just to recap, Domino is a large button, switch adapted, TV remote designed for people with limited hand and finger movement or those that have difficulty seeing and using a remote with small buttons.

Development work is complete and it has been CE certified.

Over the next three weeks we will be gearing-up to produce Domino for sales in June.

Although we started out with the idea of producing a TV remote Domino is able to do much more. It can learn the infra-red (IR) codes of most TV, DVD, video remotes on the UK market. In addition, it can learn the IR codes used to control, for example, automated doors and windows plus many other IR adapted environmental equipment found in the home.

We plan to produce a range of Domino-IR devices including a version for Sky, Sky Plus and Freeview receivers all with large button layouts to help navigate the on-screen electronic programme guide these systems use.

The change over from analogue to digital TV broadcasting in the UK will have a significant impact on how viewers watch TV. All users - disabled as well as able bodied - will need to select TV programmes and schedule recordings using an on-screen electronic programming guide, or EPG for short.

Anyone using a Sky or Freeview set top box will already be using an EPG accessed through the remote that came with their receiver.

But, individuals with limited hand and finger dexterity will likely find it difficult to press the small buttons on standard remotes and, instead, may prefer to use an adapted device to operate their TV and Sky or Freeview receiver. Moving to an on-screen electronic programming guide will likely make it more difficult for these individuals to access their favourite programmes.

To address this issue we have started work on a switch adapted, larger button, remote that will help disabled individuals work the EPG on their digital TV, Sky, Sky Plus, or Freeview receivers and recorders.

We've called the device "Domino". Over the next month or so we will complete the development work and CE testing. Our goal is to have units available commercially in time for the Beijing Olympics in August 2008.

These are pictures of the working prototypes we have built so far. Both are programmable infra-red units that can "learn" the codes from an existing controller. Any standard 3.5 mm switch can be connected and used in preference or alongside the big Domino buttons.

The unit pictured left can control six functions on four separate devices such as TV, DVD, video recorder and satellite receiver. The unit pictured right has a dedicated layout of the main buttons found on a Sky Box.

I'll describe their functions and operation in more detail in my next post.

Mike

Engineers at The Soundbeam Project Ltd., Bristol, UK, have approved Dream-Melody as suitable for use with Soundbeam equipment.

Soundbeam has been most extensively and thoroughly evaluated with children with Severe Learning Difficulties and Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities.

Dream-Melody consists of a cap containing three motion sensors and a switch box. Movement of the head - forwards, left and right - triggers the Soundbeam equipment allowing the user to create a range of musical expressions.

Mike

This week Naidex 2008 get underway at the NEC, Birmingham. This is an excerpt from the official web site:

"As the UK’s largest event for homecare, disability and rehabilitation, Naidex is your best opportunity to touch, test and compare all the latest new products and services available."

Naidex 2007 was the event we chose to launch Dream-Racer with support from QED our UK distributor. This year QED will be showing our new range of switch adapted Dream-Toys, as well as Dream-Racer and they will have information available covering all the other Dream-Products we have developed for disabled and special needs individuals. (Dream-Mouse, Dream-Gamer, Dream-Melody)

We've also planned a meeting with BSKYB to discuss a new TV product. We now have a switch adapted TV remote that works the on-screen electronic programme guide (EPG) used in a Sky receiver. We think this will create a lot of interest from Sky subscribers that have difficulty using the regular remote.

Next we plan to begin work on an adapted remote for digital set-top boxes that deliver the Freeview service.

More on this later.

Mike

In January we met up with Tim from The Soundbeam Project Ltd. We'd never met before and I think he was a little surprised when we asked if we could plug some new kit into his Soundbeam equipment.

Just in case you don't know what Soundbeam is or does take a look at their web site. But, in essence it is musical equipment that uses sensors to translate body movement into digitally generated sounds and images.

Here's the connection: Soundbeam uses body movement and our new kit, we call it Dream-Melody, is a trio of motion sensitive switches activated by head movement.  

Plugging Dream-Melody directly into the Soundbeam equipment allows users to create music through head movement.

Two minutes later, Roger, a music teacher at Woodlands Special Needs School, Plymouth, walked onto the stand and saw what we had and wanted to have a go. He got really excited about the possibility it could open up for some of his students. I don't remember whether he asked or we volunteered it but Roger took Dream-Melody back to Woodlands with him.

A few weeks later he sent us some pictures of his students in a music session using Dream-Melody and some suggestions for improvements.

Since them we've completed the design and Tim is taking it to the Soundbeam user forum later this month to demonstrate it to a larger group. More to follow.

Mike

The Pre-school Learning Alliance is a leading educational charity specialising in the early years. The Alliance provides practical support to over 15,000 early years settings and makes a positive contribution to the care and education of over 800,000 young children and their families each year.

Each year the Alliance organises a conference and a series of workshops to illustrate best practise in early years care.

This years programme included four workshops presented by Pat Atkinson from the National Association of Toy & Leisure Libraries. Pat's workshop was all about "Switched Play".

I had the opportunity to meet with Pat and loan her a series of switched adapted toys to support her workshops. These are Pat's comments on the event:

In the “Switched Play” workshop at the PLA Inclusion conference I had planned to demonstrate my usual stock of performing animals with pressure switches and a latching & timing box, and a collection of simple radio controlled vehicles with different controllers. The chance to try the Dream-Racer car and performing animals with the games controller added an exciting extra dimension to the event. These new items brought me up to date and showed that hat control is a wonderful addition to the range of switched play options for children with physical impairments. Now I need to refine the head action to reduce the chaos that my car playing creates. Maybe a slower vehicle could be added to the range?

Pat Atkinson, Trainer for the National Association of Toy & Leisure Libraries. March 2008.

Mike

A few weeks ago we started to work on a series of switch adapted toys for young (3 to 7 years) children. We've had a lot of fun with these little guys and so we decided to share some videos on Google.

These are the links:

I'm meeting the supplier at the end of March to figure out what will be in the Dream-Toys catalogue on the Dream-Racer web site.

Mike

Recently I received an invitation to visit the Blackfriars School in Newcastle. Gillian, Daniels mum, prompted the invite by telling Glynis, one the the teachers at the school about the Dream-Gamer we gave Danny last Christmas.

I took this extract from the school web site.

"Blackfriars School is a large special school of 180 pupils from the age of 2 to 19 with a range of physical, learning, medical and sensory needs who come from North and Central Staffordshire and the Unitary Authority of Stoke-on-Trent. The School is dual sited, with pupils aged 2 – 16 years educated on the site in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Post 16 education is based in Bucknall, some six miles away in the City of Stoke-on-Trent. Blackfriars has built an expertise in providing Alternative and Augmentative Communication for pupils and students who require support with communication."

My first visit was to the Newcastle site. The first thing we did was to show the younger pupils some of the switch adapted toys we are working on. The yellow chick singing about "taking a bath" was a big hit as well as Shrek doing his dance.

Danny joined us and showed everyone his skills by driving a Dream-Racer Toyota Supra car around the hall. That was until Jason, one of the teachers, wanted a go and it seemed to get "confiscated" for the rest of the break time.

Just a few days ago I went along to the senior school in Bucknall and took the switch we've designed for connecting to Soundbeam equipment. If you're not familiar with Soundbeam take a look at their web site it's a really amazing piece of kit for making music through body movement.

We've decided to call the switch Dream-Melody - I'll be writing more about this over then next few weeks.

Mike

I recently took a call from someone asking if we had any switch adapted toys designed for young children with special needs. I told her about Dream-Racer and Dream-Gamer but she was looking for toys designed with a younger age group in mind. Ideally for children aged 3 to 7 years old.

As we spoke it became clear that this person was finding it difficult to source stimulating toys designed for young partially sighted, hard-of-hearing children other special needs.

That got us going and since them I've visited the toy section at Spring Fair and Mark has been investigating how to make switch adapted toys. Dancing Shrek is the first toys we have adapted

I've sourced four more electrical toys that we are sure we can modify to make switch accessible.

Take a look at the Shrek video at the top of the blog and the pictures of the switch adapted Dream-Toys we will have available once our modifications have been CE certified.

Mother bear recites nursery rhymes, worker bear sings "working on the railroad", Yellow chic sings "splish splash taking a bath" while dancing and white rabbit sings "bunny hop rock" and flaps his ears in time to the music.

I'm sure we'll have lots of fun working with these guys ...

Mike

This is the link to the video produced by the organisers of BETT 2008.

http://eventsreview.com/clients/bett/2008/review/

Anyone that has picked up on the earlier posts to this blog will know that in 2007 we had a very active product development programme underway.

We developed and commercialised Dream-Racer, Dream-Gamer and Dream-Mouse plus a range of other special Dream-Projects for children and young adults with physical disabilities.

Welcome Chris.

Chris is an electronics engineer working alongside Mark and developing his own adapted / assistive technology projects for disabled individuals.

Chris can be contacted through his own web page.

One thing is certain, 2008 will be another busy year. We currently have four new assistive technology switch projects all at the proof-of-concept stage and we are only into early February.

I have two challenges:

• Keeping up with all the new ideas being work on and,
• Building up or sales and distribution network in Europe - initially in Germany, France and The Netherlands.

On a final note we have decided to produce a range of switch adapted toys for younger children - more on this later.

Mike

SpecialEffect is a new Oxfordshire based charitable organisation dedicated to helping ALL young people with disabilities to enjoy computer games. 

Roadshow events are planned that will provide advice support and a chance for young people with disabilities to try out a range of empowering technology for themselves that will enable them to try and play the same games as their able bodied peers.

Young volunteers will be invited from Oxfordshire universities and youth organisations to share their gaming knowledge with the disabled young people they meet and be taught about the new gaming technology by SpecialEffect's experts.

Take a look at the SpecialEffect community on Facebook.

Barrie Ellis at Oneswitch.org told us about SpecialEffect and suggested we may like to get involved by donating a couple of Dream-Gamer adapted PlayStation controllers - they shipped today.

We are looking forward to taking part in some of the roadshows.

Mike

Today over forty delegates from around the West Midlands gathered at Hereward College for discussions on the use of assistive technology for students with physical disabilities. Hereward College is a general college of further education located in Coventry, West Midlands offering day and residential support for disabled students. Hereward students include people with:

• Physical disabilities including cerebral palsy, spina bifida and muscular dystrophy.
• Sensory impairment (sight & hearing)
• Learning difficulties.
• Brain and spinal injuries.
• Autism and Aspergers Syndrome.
• Medical difficulties including epilepsy, asthma and other rare conditions.
• Social, emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Hereward follows an academic and vocational curriculum designed to encourage students to act independently to prepare them for future employment and enterprise when their studies are complete.

Four students told the delegates about their experience of using assistive technology through a video interview. It was a fascinating insight for us all. Number one issue was that the assistive technology should assist and not get in the way of their expression. Secondly, it had to work reliably and thirdly it needed to look cool. Actually, none of these points are rocket science!

Many thanks to Paul Doyle and Patrick Fox for the invitation.

Mike 

Since the launch of the Dream-Racer web site and blog we have been approached by lots of people asking for something different than the standard switches and other devices found in the assistive technology catalogues. These are just three of the "special projects" we worked on in 2007:

• Alan wanted to talk about using Morse Code to communicate with an elderly relative - amazingly she still remembered it despite not using it in over 60 years.
• Gillian had a problem with the wires on a standard switch. Every 3-4 months the cable frayed and eventually broke away requiring her to buy costly replacements.
• Karl needed four switches to plug into his Joybox that he could control using his available head movement.

Gillian's switch problem was easy to fix as the mechanism worked perfectly; only the cable was broken. Reconnecting the wire saved about £15 over the cost of a new switch.

This got us thinking: there must be many people needing something a little bit different or possibly something repaired. If that's the case, we would like them to get in touch with us to describe their problem. We may be able to help.

Our contact details are on the web site or, send us a message through this blog.

Mike

Only seventeen days into January but the Christmas and new year break seems, at best, a distant memory.

Last week we visited the BETT and Special Needs Fringe exhibitions in London to look for new ideas and share some of our own with prospective partners. QED, our UK distributor had a stand at the Special Needs event and had Dream-Racer on display along with a range of other assistive technology devices designed for individuals with physical disabilities. Dream-Gamer and Dream-Mouse will be on display at their future exhibitions.

Get in touch with QED if you would like to receive a copy of their 2008 catalogue "Innovative products for people with special needs."

Next week is an open day at the Hereward College in Coventry and we will be letting the students loose with Dream-Racer and Dream-Gamer. My plan for Dream-Mouse is to show how students can use it to better access the PC for school work (this may be popular with their teachers but could be a "big yawn" with the students.)

I'll have more to report on this next week.

Today's big news: we will participate in an initiative to promote gaming to a broader audience of disabled children and young adults using Dream-Gamer to access laptop, PlayStation and Xbox360 game platforms. The programme is scheduled to begin in February - keep in touch.

Mike  

In 2008 we will be working together with Stephen at Lazarus Mobility to launch a new series of product developments. In parallel, Stephen will also introduce Dream-Racer and the other Dream-Products for purchase through his e-commerce web site.

Lazarus Mobility (UK) Limited was founded by Stephen Collins - an individual with cerebral palsy - who knows from his own experience just how hard it can be for disabled people to obtain well designed, yet affordable, equipment to help live life to the full.

Stephen recognised that much of the disabled equipment available today through conventional retail outlets is both expensive and designed by able bodied engineers with only a limited understanding of the particular requirements of a disabled end-user.

It is his mission to redress the imbalance by providing cost effective access, through www.lazarusmobility.com to products for the disabled which have been personally selected, tested and endorsed by Stephen Collins himself.

We look forward to working with Stephen on all the new product ideas in the pipeline. He's already told us he has a long list ... it looks like 2008 will be another busy year!

Mike

Despite a mis-behaving laptop, Dream-Mouse: an adapted PC controller, completed all of the testing this morning required to certify it as CE compliant.

Dream-Mouse will now move out of our development process and will be listed as a fully commercial product on the Dream-Racer web site.

Remploy have also completed their manufacturing audit and are ready to begin manufacturing it next week.

Stepping back for a moment of reflection; Dream-Mouse is the third product family we have designed, developed, CE tested and geared up for full scale manufacturing in 15 months.

Dream-Racer: radio controlled cars and trucks was launched in April. Dream-Gamer: an adapted PlayStation controller was commercialised in October.

And, 2008 will be equally exciting as we begin to move ahead with new life-style products for children and young adults with physical disabilities. Stay tuned.

Mike

For six years Disabled Living have organised the very popular annual Kidz Up North exhibition in Bolton, Lancashire focusing on equipment, products and services for disabled children and their families.

This year we decided to support QED, our UK distributor, by demonstrating Dream-Gamer and Dream-Mouse alongside Dream-Racer to the visitors.

Mark organised the games on Dream-Gamer and I set up Dream-Mouse. Trying to compete with Dream-Gamer was impossible: all the kids, mums and dads thought gaming was a lot more fun.

Next time I'll set up one-switch gaming on the PC instead of a demo that looks too much like school work. I'll be contacting Barrie at One Switch.org for some tips.

Mike

In my preparation for the visit to John Chilton School I assigned four mouse commands to the switches on Dream-Wand using Joystick-To-Mouse software. I found it comfortable to have "left mouse button", "enter", "double left click" and "right mouse button" on switches 1 through 4. Somehow, that suits me when I work with Dream-Mouse and Mini-Mouse.

A few minutes after Stephen started using it he said he wanted a different arrangement; one more to his preference and could we change it. Joystick-To-Mouse software is so flexible that within one minute we had re-mapped the switches completely.

The next student to try Dream-Wand, Alex, needed a different solution as well; he needed all the switches to work in the same way and I re-mapped all four switches to work the "left mouse button". This allowed him to concentrate more on the learning experience in the exercise than the switching itself which earlier had been getting in the way.

I also learnt how important it is, particularly to older students, for the equipment to appear discrete in order to avoid unwanted attention being drawn to the user. I didn't appreciate this when Sue originally invited me to visit John Chilton School but it's something we will be tuned into from now on.

Something else Sue showed me was "Orisinal". It's a superb site for one-switch and mouse control games designed with young children in mind. Try it.

Sue, I had a great day out and want to do it again.

Mike 

Recently I had a call from Sue, a teacher at John Chilton School in Northolt, London. Sue was interested in the Mini-Mouse we have been working on and asked if a few of her students could try it out.

John Chilton is a special school in the London Borough of Ealing. The school caters for pupils who have a physical and/or a medical disability.

We chose to run the demo on my laptop and use this blog post as a check on how well the students coped with the three Dream-Mouse input devices: Mini-Mouse, Pistol-Mouse and Cap-Mouse: each controlled by Joystick-To-Mouse software. We used the on-screen keyboard built into Windows XP for text entry.

This is what the students had to say about Dream-Mouse:

 it is a wonderfull joystick among other things  :)  ... by Stephen