Jake's Story

Case Study

Jake is 16 years old and attends a specialist school. Jake has cerebral palsy affecting all four of his limbs, he is an essential wheelchair user, nonverbal and other health related issues. Jake is 16 years old and attends a specialist school. Around five or six years ago Jake began using eye gaze at school to support choice making, at the time Jake was sociable, enjoyed playing his toy piano and would clap his hands if he enjoyed something. Jake got his own eye gaze device so that he could use it both at home and school. He had some very simple cause and effect games on his eye gaze device that he enjoyed playing. Initially Jake was very motivated by to use his eye gaze and had a simple grid to support choices of activities in his lessons. However following several bouts of ill health, it was noted that Jake had begun to disengage with not just his eye gaze but was not really interested in anything, it was also noted that Jake had no intentional communication.

Then one day at school his classmates were choosing and playing their favourite songs and Jake discovered ‘The Spice Girls!’ Well Jake was just beaming and there was even a bit of shoulder jerking and humming going on. Following on from this Jak listened to some other girl bands. Jake had been choosing to opt out because he had had simple cause and effect games presented to him which he thought was babyish, he wanted to listen to music and play more age-appropriate games.

Following this discovery Jake tried some more advanced age-appropriate games with his eye gaze device but unfortunately his existing device just did not have the processing speeds to support the games. We tried the games on a newer eye gaze device that could cope with the games and Jake was in his element. He was racing round motorbike tracks and playing football all with his eyes.

We introduced a very simple communication grid to give Jake the choice of ‘more, finish or something different’ which for the first time in around 3 years he engaged with and expressed he wanted more when the game finished. After a few rounds of the same game Jake then selected something different on the communication grid so we tried a different game. We gradually introduced music grids initially giving Jake a choice of three song videos to choose from. Wanting to keep Jake as motivated and engaged as possible we increased the amount of music videos on a music grid initially to four, then six and then eight. Jake was now taking part in the music choice session in class as he was able to select and play his choice on his music grid.

As Jake was highly motivated by this and was showing definite signs of intentional communication, we introduced communication software, with support from Jake’s Speech and Language Therapist. Initially we introduced Jake to Symbol talker A, this meant that Jake could use symbols to locate the word he is wanting to say. Jake interacted with this well and made effective use of the opinions page, especially when listening to music. Jake’s sense of humour emerged when the opinions page was introduced and thought it highly amusing to tell someone something is rubbish! Jake began to quickly navigate between pages and one day when he overheard someone talking about their holiday, he quickly navigated to the month he went on holiday then selected the country he had been to.

He also overheard someone saying what their favourite song was and quickly responded by playing it for them on his talker.

Jake had only been using Symbol talker for a couple of months when one day he said he wanted ‘more,’ this was referring to the vocabulary. Following a discussion with the Speech and Language Therapist and Jake we introduced Super Core 30; Jake loved this and was learning how to navigate to pages very quickly to engage in a conversation.

Jake is now using his eye gaze (or talker as he refers to it) to instruct his support worker to control the schools new 4D room. He has a bespoke grid set for this where all the items in the room have been listed including the bubble tube, wall lights and projector and then he tells them what colour and what he wants it to do using his grid set. This is in preparation for this terms class topic where Jake will be designing and a car and demonstrating it in the 4D room.