Using the Baby-Babble-Blanket for infants with motor problems

摘要

Children with motor problems often develop to be passive, presumably because of an inability to communicate and to control the environment. The Baby-Babble-Blanket (BBB), a pad with pressure switches linked to a Macintosh computer, was developed to meet this need. Lying on the pad, infants use head-rolling, leg-lifting and kicking to produce digitized sound. Data is collected by the BBB software on the infant's switch activations. An empirical study was carried out on a five-month-old infant with club feet, hydrocephaly and poor muscle tone to determine what movements the infant could use to access the pad, whether movements would increase over a baseline in response to sound, and what level of cause and effect the infant would demonstrate. Videotapes and switch activation data suggest that the infant:

1) could activate the device by rolling his head and raising his legs.

2) increased switch activations, over a no-sound baseline, in response to the sound ofhis mother's voice.

3) was able to change from using his head to raising his legs in response to the reinforcer.