Human factors engineering challenges in therapeutic tele-play systems for children with disabilities

Therapeutic teleplay focuses on the use of personal augmentative devices (PADs), exploratory agents to enable tele-interaction, evaluation, and development of abilities in children with severe disabilities. The child controls the remote agent to accomplish a variety of cognitive and motor developmental tasks. Human factor challenges include optimizing the human-technology interface by using physiological signals to control the device, mapping the actions of the remote agent to the inputs of the user, and providing appropriate multisensory feedback to the user.