Now it’s Penn State’s turn
Gareth sure does inspire a lot of activity. He was one of the youngest kids in the nation to start using assistive computer technology, helping pioneer a program in which kids as young as 3 years old start using touchscreen speech systems. Then, recently, his enthusiasm rallied Make-A-Wish to get him his awesome bike.
And now…
A group of four engineering students at Penn State have chosen Gareth as the subject of their EPICS (Engineering Projects In Community Service) project to create a joystick/button system that emulates mouse control on a computer system. We had the first meeting with the EPICS team today where we did a bit of brainstorming and introduced the team to Gareth. Next week, we’ll be meeting again so they can see Gareth use his existing home joysticks. The goal of the project is to provide Gare with a hardware interface that allows him finer control of his on-screen selections. This should eventually lead to his ability to spell out words instead of using a pure picture system.
Here’s hoping that goes well.
We have booked a day at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to meet with their cerebral palsy team. They’ll be doing a number of assessments over the course of a few hours in order to determine some effective treatments for him going forward. Of greatest interest to us is any information regarding Gareth’s swallow. Solving that issue is our Holy Grail - if Gareth can swallow, we can send the nurses home and never have to give a nightly report ever again.