No abstract

Low vision is a visual impairment that cannot be improved by standard vision aids such as glasses. Therefore, to improve their visual skills, people affected by low vision usually follow a visual training program planned and supervised by an expert in this field. Visual training is especially suitable for children because of their plasticity for learning. However, due to a lack of specialists, training sessions are usually less frequent than optimal. Thus, home-based visual training has emerged as a solution to this problem because it can be undertaken by experts and families together. We implemented the Visual Stimulation on the Internet (EVIN) application, which provides comprehensive visual training tasks through games. It also provides reports on children's performance in these visual training tasks. Although EVIN has shown its usefulness in previous works, two main solutions are needed: (i) a support setup to help experts and families work together to address, among other things, the large variety of exercises and different configurations that can be prescribed and (ii) a rigorous experimental design to compare children trained with EVIN and those trained with traditional materials. To face these challenges, we present an adaptive version of EVIN that provides a new design tool that allows experts to plan visual training tasks through templates in advance. In addition, we developed new metrics and reports to achieve a more accurate assessment of a child's improvement. Among other results, it allowed us to develop an reliable experiment to evaluate significant improvements in children trained with EVIN.

To an extent, vision is a function that can be learned. Broadly speaking, this learning -named visual perceptive development, takes place spontaneously. Nevertheless, it is not the case of a significant number of children who, due to their visual or perceptual impairment, have difficulties either receiving or processing visual stimuli from their environment. In this case, Visual Stimulation programs should be applied to these people so that their visual functions can be developed.The advances developed in last two decades on information and communication technologies, ICT, are not reflected in the existing software tools for the field. As a contribution to solve this problem, we have designed and developed an Interactive Educational System supported on a web platform with the main aim to provide professionals the required mechanisms to perform the basic Visual Stimulation tasks. At the same time, it takes advantage of the several opportunities offered by the Internet. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of previous existing tools and present EVIN (Visual Stimulation on the Internet). The main objective of the EVIN project is the development of a web platform which exploits the potential of ICT along with the experience gained by low vision professionals.

La baja visión es una deficiencia visual que no puede ser mejorada con ayudas ópticas convencionales. No obstante, para incrementar sus habilidades estas personas pueden seguir un programa de entrenamiento visual planificado y supervisado por un experto en este campo. Este entrenamiento es especialmente efectivo en niños, debido a su plasticidad para aprender. Pero, debido a la falta de expertos especializados, las sesiones de entrenamiento son generalmente menos frecuentes de lo que sería conveniente. Los programas de entrenamiento visual online son una solución para mitigar este problema, porque pueden ser llevado a efecto por expertos y familias de forma conjunta. De este modo, desarrollamos la aplicación Estimulación Visual en Internet (EVIN), que proporciona un programa de entrenamiento visual en diferentes tareas a través de juegos. Además, presenta informes de los resultados de los niños durante el entrenamiento. Aunque en trabajos anteriores ya se ha probado la utilidad de EVIN, se ha visto necesaria abordar dos nuevas metas: (i) proporcionar algún tipo de soporte en EVIN que ayude a expertos y familias a trabajar juntos debido, entre otras causas, a la gran variedad de ejercicios y configuraciones que pueden ser prescritas a los niños y, (ii) diseñar un riguroso experimento para comparar el entrenamiento visual en niños con EVIN con el entrenamiento con métodos tradicionales. Para afrontar estos objetivos, presentamos una versión adaptativa de EVIN que proporciona una nueva herramienta que permite al experto planificar el entrenamiento visual usando plantillas de ejercicios prediseñadas. Además, hemos desarrollado nuevas métricas e informes que permiten valorar con mayor precisión los resultados de los niños. Todo ello nos ha permitido desarrollar un experimento para evaluar si se produce mejora significativa en los niños entrenados con EVIN.