Evaluation of the Efficacy of Fine Motor Skill Practice by Using Tangible User Interface through Educational Games in Children with Intellectual Disability

Abstract

A variety of educational games have been designed to enhance learning for children with intellectual disabilities in various fields such as mathematics, reading, writing skills. However, developing a tangible user interface (TUI) system that encourages learning by touching and manipulating objects by creating a similar experience for interactions with real world objects, to our knowledge, has not been explored yet. Besides, in the practice of development of fine motor skill with occupational therapists, children are less likely to cooperate and must be motivated at all times. Therefore, this paper explored the use of a tangible user interface for children with intellectual disabilities for fine motor skill practice. An experiment was conducted among 60 children with intellectual disabilities and the results were compared with conventional practice with an occupational therapist.

The results revealed that children with intellectual disabilities who practiced with the TUI training system had better development of fine motor skills with higher hand force’s scores than those practiced with conventional methods. There was a significant difference in the average value of the hand’s force at the 0.05 level, and children had more interest and preferred to train with TUI than conventional methods.