New apps to facilitate learning for people with functional diversity

Specialists have designed and implemented new Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications (apps) to facilitate learning for people with functional diversity.

The apps are the work of a team of professors and researchers from the Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in Spain, and students from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) in China.

The project is being carried out in collaboration with the Occupational Center for People with functional diversity “La Torre” in Valencia, making the different developed applications available to you.

“It is undeniable that we live in an increasingly digital reality. With these applications, we want to help the learning, autonomy and creativity of people with functional diversity,” highlights Carlos Hernández Franco, professor at the ETSI of Telecommunications and researcher at the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM) of the UPV.

Both applications, designed for mobile phones and/or tablets in the Android environment, combine text-type information with pictograms, in order to make their use possible by any user of the occupational center.

The Virtual Reality app converts the environments where people with functional diversity from the occupational center carry out their activities into this technology. The UPV and BUPT team has virtualized its different elements, from shelves and tables to chairs, doors, etc.; It has also converted the tools they use into Virtual Reality, such as scissors, pencils, erasers, sheets of paper and more, as well as the activities they carry out in this environment. With all this, this application allows them greater autonomy and this in turn implies an increase in self-esteem, explains Hernández Franco.

These new mobile phone applications are designed to facilitate learning for people with functional diversity. (Photo: Polytechnic University of Valencia)

Likewise, the professionals who carry out their functions in the occupational center see in this technological proposal a support tool for the dynamization of the learning processes of its users.

On the other hand, the Augmented Reality App makes it easier to learn how to use tools, how to perform a certain task, etc.

The development of these applications is also part of the “Inclusive Mobile” project, which has the collaboration of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. (Source: Polytechnic University of Valencia)