Children with cerebral palsy affecting the whole body who have little or no functional speech, and who cannot use limb movements to point or select, are often reliant on using their eyes to communicate and engage with the world.
Professionals observe children’s looking behaviour during assessment as a way of determining receptive language and cognitive abilities in this otherwise hard to assess population. Deliberate eye gaze fixations can also be used as an access method for augmentative & alternative communication (AAC).
Although the term eye-pointing is often used when describing children’s looking behaviours, there is often poor agreement between professionals concerning which looking behaviours constitute genuine eye-pointing for communication and which do not. A lack of consensus can have profound implications for clinical practice.
The eye-pointing classification scale has been designed and tested to support professionals and families to systematically describe children’s looking behaviour in relation to eye-pointing.
For more information see: www.ucl.ac.uk/gaze
The App:
* Provides a tutorial and training in use of the scale
* Allows the user to record ongoing observations of looking behaviour using the scale
* Offers the facility to annotate observations
* Stores data from multiple observations for individual participants.
* Exports data in pdf or CSV format.