Babb, S., Jung, S., Ousley, C., McNaughton, D., & Light, J. (2021). Personalized AAC intervention to increase participation and communication for a young adult with Down syndrome. Topics in Language Disorders, 41(3), 232-248. https://doi.org/10.1097/TLD.0000000000000240
Background
Many adults with Down syndrome experience difficulty with speech production; communication breakdowns are common, especially with unfamiliar communication partners. As a result, individuals with Down syndrome are severely restricted in their successful participation in community, post-secondary education, and vocational activities. This paper documents the implementation and evaluation of AAC intervention utilizing video visual scene displays (video VSD) in two studies.
Video VSD Technology
The video VSD technology was developed under our prior RERC on AAC (2014-20) to enhance communication and participation in a wide range of community, vocational, and education activities for individuals with developmental disabilities and complex communication needs.
-The video VSD technology allows a facilitator (e.g., service provider, family member) to (a) capture a video of someone accurately performing the target activity (e.g., shopping for groceries); (b) pause the video within the app to automatically create a still image at key junctures in the video (e.g., asking for an item at the deli counter); and (c) quickly and easily program a hotspot on this still image (VSD), providing a communication “hotspot” which produces speech output when touched.
-The video VSD technology provides video models of each step within a multistep community, vocational, or educational activity as well as AAC supports to ensure successful communication as required within the activity.
-The video VSD technology can be personalized quickly and easily to ensure that it meets the needs of the individual with complex communication needs.
Study 1
The video VSD intervention significantly increased the successful communication of the individual with Down syndrome in an inclusive post-secondary education program. With access to the video VSD technology, the individual with Down syndrome took significantly more communication turns and a greater number of these turns were successful; he sustained much longer interactions with peers without disabilities.
Study 2
The video VSD technology also resulted in substantial increases in successful communication and participation when grocery shopping in the community. With only minimal intervention, the individual with Down syndrome was able to independently shop for groceries using the video VSD technology. Furthermore, results generalized to a completely new grocery list; he was 100% successful purchasing the new items with the video VSD technology without any additional training or prompting support from others (e.g., aide, family member). The participant, family, and key communication partners all viewed the video VSD intervention positively; they reported high levels of satisfaction with the technology.
Conclusions
The results provide preliminary evidence that personalized AAC intervention using video VSD technology supports successful communication and participation in community, vocational, and post-secondary education settings for adults with Down syndrome and complex communication needs.
The personalized AAC intervention (using a video VSD approach) not only resulted in improved performance on traditional measures of communication outcomes (i.e., number of intelligible words per minute, percentage of steps completed successfully), but was also viewed by the participant, and key stakeholders, as an effective method to address key participation and communication goals.
Babb et al. (2021)
