NeuroSwitch in the Classroom

Assistive technology in the classroom is vital to enabling children to learn early how to develop communications and control skills as they begin their academic journeys, despite disability.

Many excellent products have been developed to enable children with disabilities to begin their academic lives as easily as possible. Most of these products require a child to learn how to coordinate a movement or action to control their augmentative or assistive technology system.

One outstanding feature of NeuroSwitch is that the user does not have to navigate to a button or switch or touch screen. They merely have to send a signal to their sensors in effect they become the switch.

This transition happens quickly, and once a user forgets about how they make a switch action - as they can with NeuroSwitch - they can focus entirely on what they want to say or do with the system.

NeuroSwitch was developed after extensive testing by students in the classrooms of Kimi Ora School in Wellington, New Zealand - one of the most advanced and comprehensive schools in the world, for children with profound disabilities. As you will see from the accounts and video on the Kimi Ora stories page, NeuroSwitch enables much more than simple text and text-to-speech communication. (Please note: the video on this page is of an early model of NeuroSwitch - the system now comes fully set up on an Apple MacBook Pro laptop computer with Bluetooth replacing the cables you see in the video).

As the excellent therapists and students at Kimi Ora have shown, Neuroswitch represents the best advanced development of assistive technology in the classroom.