Thing 22:Improving outcomes

For this badge I was to look at how technology can improve outcomes for people who use social services, in my case the children who attend our school.

With the present climate we live in technology has been a saving grace. From the point of the staff recording lessons and the children taking part in these lessons at home through Zoom. Emailing timetables to parents to minimise users at the centre at one time. Showing the parents the therapy that the staff do at the school for the parents to watch back and give their child the stretches they require on a daily basis. This has a positive impact on both the children's learning and physical wellbeing. It also helps the Teachers, EYPs, OTs, PTs and Speech and Language  staff to still be able to do their jobs to support development of the holistic child and young user. 

I looked at different types of digital technology we could use to improve the outcome for our users. I did not know what the Internet of Things was (IoT) so I searched online and found various articles. 

I liked https://econsultancy.com/internet-of-things-healthcare/  as it gave me an understanding of what it was. We could use IoT devices tagged with sensors to locate medical equipment like wheelchairs, oxygen pumps or nebulizers. One thing that I thought of was smart beds that automatically adjust the correct angle and pressure to provide better support without the need of a parent having to do this during the night thus getting a better sleep themselves. This would also help the user with limiting bed sores.

Wearable technology is already used with some users to monitor how active they are and seeing if they are doing their daily exercise programme. This could also be used with augmented reality such as PokemonGo to get the user to have something else to engage with whilst doing their exercise. This would encourage the user to want to go out and not be thinking of the steps they are doing.

Virtual reality can be used in helping children and adults with autism spectrum disorder. It can put them in a calm place and help to sooth them. Although I still feel virtual reality headwear can still be expensive and it would only be able to be used by some of our users.

Echo is a voice recognition form of technology that I have only found out that one of our children uses to sleep at night. The brother asks Echo to play the song list that helps his sibling sleep. 

Facial recognition was one technology that I found hard to put into my setting. I thought we could maybe use it to sign into the users own eye gaze systems. If they wanted to use it and nobody was there to switch it on. Like a password for our phones. I did like the idea that technology could get so good that we could analyse a persons face and from these cues be able to determine information about that persons physiological health. 

Some of our children have motor impairments so to be able to sit in their wheelchair but feel they are manoeuvring around a room on their own would be really exciting for them. They can express themselves where they want to go to. The negative side to all this technology is cost and glitches in the systems. Also we have children who are registered blind and cant speak so this technology would not be any good to them.