A Microswitch-based Program to Enable Students with Multiple Disabilities to Choose among Environmental Stimuli

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Students with multiple disabilities, such as severe to profound mental retardation combined with motor and visual impairment, are usually unable to engage in constructive activity or play a positive role in their daily context. Microswitches are technical tools that may help them improve their status by allowing them to control environmental events with small and simple responses suitable to their condition. Recently, a pilot study was conducted to assess such a program with a boy who had multiple disabilities, including total blindness and minimal motor behavior. The results were encouraging, in that the boy became quite active and chose stimuli he was expected to prefer and bypassed those he was not, thus exhibiting purposeful choice behavior. The present study reported in this paper served as a replication and extension of the pilot study, with two new students who had multiple disabilities. These students relied on a vocalization response to activate the microswitch as opposed to the eyebrow movements used in the pilot study. A computer system was used to handle sets of expected preferred and nonpreferred stimuli: it presented brief samples of the stimuli and eventually turned them on for longer periods of time if students selected them. The results of this study found encouraging evidence for the possibility of using specifically developed microswitch programs to enable individuals with minimal residual vision, limited motor behavior, and circumscribed intellectual ability to choose among environmental stimuli. Further research may help determine the generalizability of these results and assess ways of integrating different microswitch programs into the daily educational schedule of such individuals.