SBIR-STTR Award

The broad long-term objectives of this project are to design, build, and evaluate the efficacy of a virtual reality instructional fire safety sequence for children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effects. Specific aims are: 1) Analyze how virtual reality fire safety instructional learning programs developed by the company for children with autism could be modified to address the different learning needs of children with FAS and FAE; 2) Design and code one level of a fire safety program using virtual reality technology for home and school use; 3) Demonstrate the efficacy of the instructional software through use of applied behavior analysis and single subjects design. The learning environment afforded by virtual reality may improve skills training for individuals with mental, developmental, and attention disorders if virtual worlds can match their specialized needs. The research design and methods for achieving these goals are: 1) Choose children who have been diagnosed with FAS or FAE; 2) Design and program a PC based virtual reality critical environment to teach proper response to a home fire and be engaging to children with these disorders; 3) Conduct trials to evaluate the results using n, multiple baselines across subjects design. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: Virtual reality learning environments would have a broad market appeal for children, parents, teachers, and health practitioners for treatment of FAS and FAE. A present company web site provides similar products for children with autism, allowing an in-place cost effective delivery and support system for this new product.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAS/FAE) are a series of irreversible birth defects that persist throughout the life span of the individual. Because of developmental delays and deficits in abstract thinking, children with these disorders can miss the connection between cause and effect, which often results in risky behaviors and dangerous encounters with their environment. Phase II proposes to develop a virtual reality Safety Skills Training Program to help children with these special learning needs better understand and practice correct safety actions. It will use a series of virtual situations that model hazardous real-life situations. All four milestones in Phase I were met. These included: (1) establishing the program design for the special learning requirements of children with FAS/FAE, (2) developing a virtual reality program, worlds, and characters to teach home fire safety actions, customized for these special learning needs, (3) demonstrating the playability of the program on a home PC to establish commercial viability, and (4) testing the program with children with this disorder. Efficacy of the program was tested using a multiple baseline, multiple probe design, with five children who had been diagnosed with fetal alcohol related disorders. The results indicated that all the children reached 100% accuracy in identifying fire safety components, defined as doing the correct safety steps in the virtual world, and that eighty percent of these children were able to perform all actions correctly in both generalization and follow-up probes in the real world following virtual training. Phase II will extend the learning concepts developed in Phase I to a final Safety Skills Training Program product to be delivered for game play on a home PC. It will include safety modules, an integrated safety game, and support tools to allow a child to practice correct safety actions in controlled virtual worlds and to help the child generalize these actions to the real world. Program efficacy will be measured with thirty children ages four to ten years old with fetal alcohol related disorders. Phase II will utilize a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to detect differences between groups trained on different selected safety skills.

Thesaurus Terms:
Internet, child (0-11), child psychology, cognition, comprehension, computer simulation, fetal alcohol syndrome, learning transfer, training child behavior, computer human interaction, computer system design /evaluation, education evaluation /planning, educational resource design /development, health behavior, injury prevention, medical complication, perception disorder behavioral /social science research tag, clinical research, human subject, psychological test