Inclusive Cross-sensory Social Play

Dr Oussama Metatla’s 5-years ERC Consolidator Grant to study cross-sensory cognition and early development technology interventions for blind and visually impaired children and their sighted peers.

Assistive technologies (ATs) help disabled individuals to perform functions that might be otherwise difficult or impossible. However, their design has been largely grounded in a medical view of disability, focusing on addressing the functional limitations imposed by medical conditions at the expense of the situated and social nature of meaning making between a disabled person and their social and physical environments. This has had inadvertent negative impact on the inclusion of disabled people in society, particularly for disabled children.

With inclusiveXplay, I aim to radically change the way we design, engineer and evaluate assistive technologies for blind and visually impaired (BVI) children by integrating notions of cross-sensory experiences with social engagement with sighted peers.

inclusiveXplay will establish a novel interdisciplinary coupling of engineering, scientific foundation and child-centred design to create a new framework for inclusive cross-sensory assistive technologies.We seek to understand cross-sensory cognition that could be shared between BVI and sighted children, to use this understanding to ground the engineering of novel cross-sensory playful shape-changing technologies, and to apply the resulting knowledge to the design of an early development intervention that we will evaluate in-situ.

Findings from inclusiveXplay research will lay the foundations for a new paradigm for inclusive assistive technologies, which will revolutionise assistive technology research, and transform policy and practice around early child development and equity for disabled individuals in society.

Available positions

There are no openings at the moment.

inclusiveXplay is an ERC-selected, UKRI-funded project.