- Smart Healthcare, Wednesday 15 July 2009 09.00 BST
Pressing work: a client of St Anne's uses its touch screen equipment. Photo: St Anne's Community Services
The government is keen to promote digital inclusion. It has devoted a minister, a cabinet committee, a champion and an action plan to the issue. However, much of the effort is aimed at helping people who are unemployed or otherwise economically disadvantaged, whereas society's most digitally excluded citizens are those with disabilities, and learning disabilities in particular.
St Anne's Community Services in Leeds has been working on how ICT can be used to empower people with learning disabilities for the last two years. It has introduced touch screens and accessible tailored software so that its residents, some of whom have profound learning disabilities or dementia, can learn, communicate and interact more effectively.
The project is the brainchild of Mark Fennelly, one of St Anne's area managers. Fennelly, a trained nurse with an interest in computers, was inspired by the ways schools use computers, as well as the Home Farm Trust, a national charity which champions the use of assistive technologies to support people with learning disabilities.
Working with Inclusive IT, a Halifax-based company specialising in tailored ICT for people with special needs, Fennelly developed a range of programmes for people at St Anne's.
One young man with learning disabilities who had twice been knocked down by cars near his home was equipped with an interactive programme on road safety linked to a touch screen PC. The programme allows him to continue his online journey only when he has found somewhere safe to cross the road. "It promotes independence while balancing the risks that true independence brings," says Fennelly.
Another programme uses pictures and voices to reassure a resident that she will receive a visit from her key worker. A St Anne's resident with profound learning disabilities has an obsession with pork pies. His constant requests for the calorific delicacy posed a significant risk to his health, however.
A simple approach using a digital camera, music and a PowerPoint presentation on a touch screen PC helped with the problem, as Fennelly explains: "Each time the client touched the screen a small piece of pie was nibbled until it eventually disappeared. He was thrilled at this, which became a great game. He now asks for pork pies, but staff have realised that he wants to play the game on the computer.
"The client gets the benefit of a healthy diet and the recognition of empowering his choice in doing what he wants. And of course he still gets to eat pork pies occasionally!"
Link to the outside world
Digital images from the outside world posted on touch screens are prompting memory of places and people for some clients receiving end of life care or in the advanced stages of dementia. They are individuals who would often otherwise experience severe isolation from the outside world, and their families can struggle to understand that they retain an ability to communicate, however simply.
"It can be very reassuring for a son or daughter to know that their mother can touch a picture on a touch sensitive screen which has been programmed with family pictures overlaid with a voice to know that they can remember who they are," says Fennelly.
Video demonstrations are helping clients to learn or maintain every day tasks. As Fennelly points out: "Even if it is only filling a kettle, people will go about this in very different ways, whereas a video demonstration is always consistent. Often when people are learning they want to see the same thing repeatedly, particularly when they have got dementia.
"We did some work on garden projects and took video footage. If we had not done that it would have been hard to look back at summer when winter arrives, because people may forget what summer is like when they have got dementia."
St Anne's is exploring how it can use mobile tablet PCs for "more focused work", an intranet to survey of clients using pictures, and an electronic a person-centred plan of needs, aspirations and health goals enabled by a touch screen technology.
And Fennelly is spreading the good news, particularly through a regular benchmarking group of similar organisations. "We often discuss ICT at our benchmarking meetings, and we actually got the company that did some of our work to do a demonstration for them as well," he says.
Donations, fundraising and "creative work around budgets" have supported St Anne's ICT developments to date. Only lack of money and imagination will restrain further progress. "As we have demonstrated, with minimal outlay and a lot of imagination, people with learning disabilities are communicating and having fun," enthuses Fennelly.
* St Anne's Community Services won the customer services category in this year's GC Awards
