Access to inclusive and qualitative education on an equal basis is a clear right of every child, even from the very beginning in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). However, inclusive education is often not possible without access to appropriate (assistive) technologies. Notwithstanding the opportunities of technology to enhance inclusion of all children, it is still limitedly integrated by educators and teachers into their curriculum. Therefore, the SKATE project aims in gearing innovative technology as resource for inclusive education. This study describes and evaluates the preparation, the design, the implementation, and the effects of technology-based classroom activities in inclusive ECEC. The classroom activities are developed and implemented by school teams of 14 preschools spread over four European (EU) countries. A total of 50 school team members participated in a SKATE Learning Programme. This resulted in more than 20 technology-based inclusive class activities, created by school teams together with technology experts. Across the four countries, approximately 330 pre-schoolers, with and without special educational needs (SEN), participated. At this moment, 13 school team members from four EU countries and 45 parents from two EU countries evaluated the technology-based inclusive classroom activities. Nearly all teachers agreed that the activity promoted the inclusion of all children. Teachers reported that most of the children enjoyed the activity. This was confirmed in the evaluation by the parents. Most parents had the impression that the activity was meaningful, joyful and inclusive for all children.

Accumulating evidence supports the use of virtual reality (VR) as an effective pain and anxiety management tool for pediatric patients during specific medical procedures in dedicated patient groups. However, VR is still not widely adopted in everyday clinical practice. Feasibility and acceptability measures of clinicians' experiences are often missing in studies, thereby omitting an important stakeholder in VR use in a clinical setting. Therefore, the aim of this mixed-methods study was to investigate the feasibility, acceptability, tolerability (primary outcomes), and preliminary effectiveness (secondary outcome) of Relaxation-VR in both pediatric patients aged 4–16 years and clinicians. Relaxation-VR is a VR application prototype aimed to provide distraction and relaxation for a variety of patient populations and procedures and is used to reduce anxiety, stress (tension) and pain for children in hospital. Multiple measures of acceptability, feasibility and tolerability, and pre-to-post changes in measures of pain, anxiety, stress and happiness were assessed in pediatric patients. At the end of the study, acceptability and feasibility of VR use was assessed in clinicians. Results indicate that VR use (in particular, the Relaxation-VR prototype) for both distraction and relaxation is acceptable, feasible and tolerable for a variety of pediatric patients aged 4–16 years, as assessed in both patients and clinicians, and can reduce anxiety, pain and tension (stress), and increase happiness in a hospital setting.

Persons with intellectual disabilities (PwIDs) often aspire to more social inclusion by engaging in more community activities but encounter social barriers when traveling independently. Therefore, PwIDs are often accompanied by family members, friends, or volunteers. In order to both support the independent outdoor mobility of PwIDs themselves and reduce the caregivers' burden, the geographic information system-based application "Viamigo" was developed (www.viamigo.be), which allows a personal coach to monitor an individual in real time from a distance. The goal is to teach PwIDs a known individual route that they can accomplish independently while being monitored by a personal coach, caregiver, family member, or friend who is taking care of the individual making the trip. Viamigo determines the location of the user and compares this in time and space within a predetermined range and automatically sends notifications to the coach in case the user deviates from the route, travels at an incorrect speed, or enters or leaves a safe or dangerous zone, among other factors. Besides this on-route functionality, Viamigo also allows the creation of geofences around destinations (to monitor whether the user stays within a predefined zone) and emergency tracking. The initial results are promising: PwIDs successfully used Viamigo for a heterogeneous set of trips performed by several travel modes (bus, cycling, and walking) for several activity purposes (both daily recurrent trips to the day center and trips for shopping, social, and recreational purposes) and for different distances.

This paper presents a pictograph interface for Pictograph-to-Text translation, which facilitates the construction of written text on social media platforms for users with Intellectual Disabilities. For the design of the interface, a user-centred approach was adopted. Results show that the target group can appreciate accessing social media through pictograph-based technologies.

Information and Communication Technologies have radically changed the way in which we access and share information. However, accessibility for all is still far from being a reality. People with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD) currently have very limited access to the information society and, in particular, to social media websites. Even though the recent technological advances have provided valuable support for people with disabilities, the focus has in most cases been placed on sensory and physical impairments, while IDD is normally not on the agenda of technology developers. In this paper, we will describe how the Able to Include project is changing this situation, using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. We will also describe how the pilot studies guide us in improving our tools.

The CIP-project Able To Include (ATI) is run by partners from five European countries. The aim is to create a technical solution thus ensuring that people with intellectual disabilities can use applications to lead fulfilling, independent lives. ATI is developing an accessibility layer that will integrate with existent and future ICT tools. The integration of this accessibility layer will be tested in 3 different pilots in Spain, Belgium and UK, and in 3 different usage scenarios: leisure within the information society, mobility and labor integration. To optimize the design, ATI chooses a collaborative approach with the end-users, i.e. people with IDD. To achieve this, focus groups were set up with people with IDD and with caregivers of people with IDD. The main purpose of this research was to explore the experiences and the current knowledge of people with Intellectual Developmental Disabilities (IDD) regarding social media. This paper mainly focuses on the technological results of the focus groups held in Belgium. Researchers found that people with IDD have a great interest in social media. It holds a lot of possibilities, yet people with IDD also encounter several issues, either with the devices being used, or coming from the application itself. As communicating through social media seems to be a critical issue, the tools developed by ATI can be of great value. A human centered design, including the end-users by the means of focus groups, enables researches to produce customized designing solutions, taking into account the needs and the specific context of use for people with IDD.

The ABLE-TO-INCLUDE is a European CIP project that seeks to improve the lives of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) and similar conditions. In order to be included in today's society it is becoming increasingly important to be able to use the current available technological tools. The number of apps is growing exponentially but very few are really accessible to people with IDD. Accessibility is usually a missing variable of the equation, and when present is usually directed towards user with a sensory disability, such as visual or listening impairment. This scenario derives in a social breach that excludes people with IDD from the information society. In order to palliate this situation, the ABLE-TO-INLCUDE project creates a context aware accessibility layer based in developed components that, by being integrated with existent and future ICT tools (especially with mobile apps) can improve daily tasks of people with IDD and help them interact with the information society. The integration of this accessibility layer with existent ICT tools will be demonstrated in 3 different pilots in Spain, Belgium and UK, in 3 different usage scenarios (leisure within the information society, mobility and labour integration). In this paper, we focus on the mobility pilot in Belgium. This pilot builds on the research that led to the development of the Viamigo toolkit. This is composed of apps that monitors people on the move, evaluates their position against the expected path and alerts caretakers or coaches when unexpected events occur. The benefits of such a toolkit are discussed. Vulnerable people use Viamigo. The organisations, parents and caretakers are often not very familiar with the use of technology. The design and modeling of Viamigo is therefore much depending on users expectations and acceptance of the technology. This paper will report on methods and results of the human-centered approach walked hand in hand with the development cycle. This paper also reports on interactions with the different stakeholders, the technological choices that resulted from this and the architecture that is put in place to support these choices. The Viamigo project is used as an interdisciplinary platform that brings together students from engineering, social science and occupational therapy. They contribute to the research from different perspectives and collaborate over the borders of their own study field. Finally, we discuss the future development, based on user experiences and technological opportunities.

When working with youngsters with intellectual disabilities, it is often a challenge to teach them ‘boring' content (e.g. the ‘rules of daily living' in their school or care-center). In this paper we propose a serious gaming approach in order to facilitate the learning process. The novelty in our concept is that we decouple the game and the didactical content, which allows us to transfer the learning to the youngster's leisure time. In our research, we built a framework containing several (fun) games and an administration environment that facilitates the creation of learning content. In a user experiment, measuring the user's joy and motivationwe found that the subjects enjoyed playing the games and were very attentive when the didactical content appeared.