Clinical assessment of the TechArm system on visually impaired and blind children during uni- and multi-sensory perception tasks

Introduction

This dataset includes the raw data linked with the paper “Clinical assessment of the TechArm system on visually impaired and blind children during uni- and multi-sensory perception tasks ”.

In this paper, we validated the TechArm system on a pediatric population of visually impaired (low-vision and blind), and sighted children.

Raw data concerning sighted children are collected in the first sheet, while raw data for visually impaired children are in the second sheet. Encoding is available in the third sheet.

Methods

8 blind children (B, mean age 10.50 ± 4.21 y.o.), 23 children with low vision (LV, mean age 92 9.87 ± 3.09 y.o.), and 23 age-matched sighted children (S, mean age 9.83 ± 3.01 y.o.) were enrolled in the study. Four TechArm units were used to deliver uni- (audio or tactile) or multi-sensory stimulation (audio-tactile) on the participant’s arm, and subject was asked to evaluate the number of active units (see Martolini et al, Brain Sciences, 2021 for a presentation of the protocol).

Results (in brief)

Results showed no significant difference among groups (normal or impaired vision). Overall, we observed the best performance in tactile condition, while auditory accuracy was around chance level. Also, we found that the audio-tactile condition is better than the audio condition alone, suggesting that multisensory stimulation is beneficial when perceptual accuracy and precision are low. Interestingly, we observed that for low-vision children the accuracy in audio condition improved proportionally to the severity of the visual impairment. Our findings confirmed the TechArm system's effectiveness in assessing perceptual competencies in sighted and visually impaired children, and its potential to be used to develop personalized rehabilitation programs for people with visual and sensory impairments.