From blog on Blindness ..
Help Blind People Combat the Tendency to Rock Back and Forth
Posted July 16, 2014 by Corbb O'Connor & filed under Technology.
For years, teachers of blind students have been talking about teaching 
strategies for students who sway, spin, or rock back and forth in their 
chairs. In just a few months, we’ll be able to say that there’s an app 
for that, too.
Developed by Tyler K. Thompson—an assistive technology teacher in New 
Mexico—uses an iPhone’s gyroscope to alert students when they rock back 
and forth.
“I had a student come to the center whose case was pretty severe,” 
Thompson said at the 13th annual Contemporary Issues In Rehabilitation 
and Education for the Blind conference. “When he’d be rocking back and 
forth, he’d actually be moving the chair. ‘Do you hear that noise?’ I’d 
ask. ‘What noise?’ he’d say. ‘Uh, do you hear the chair squeak? That’s 
you!’”
Instructors at the center tried the techniques teachers have been using 
for years: tapping the student on the shoulder, telling him to stop 
rocking, and talking about why the behavior was so unbecoming of him 
from a professional point of view. No luck.
“So, the executive director of the New Mexico Commission for the Blind 
came to ask me and asked if we could use the iPhone to help with this,” 
Thompson said. “So, I gave it a try.”
With the iPhone in your pants pocket, the app works by vibrating when 
you are doing anything similar to rocking. (On a geeky note, one of 
Thompson’s first tasks was to analyze what a rocking motion looked like 
by recording the behavior in three-dimensional data, and “everyone’s 
rock looks different,” he said.)
After telling the student that his job was to make the phone stop 
vibrating, the instructor from Alamogordo, New Mexico discovered that 
his student stopped rocking back and forth…at least temporarily.
“Then we had a longer period, where I was conducting a seminar and I 
gave him the phone,” he said. “I told him to do the same thing over 
again. I asked him at the end of the hour-long seminar, how it went. He 
said, ‘Well, your phone was vibrating the whole time.’ However, I’ve had 
success with it already.”
The true application of the app, Thompson said, is not something you’d 
have running all the time. The thought is that if, for example, people 
tell you that you rock in your chair and you want to be sure that you 
don’t do that during a job interview, you could have the app running for 
a short period of time.
Future versions of the app may be able to use a watch running iOS, 
rumored to be in production by Apple, to record specific behaviors. The 
app could help with things like restless leg syndrome, eye poking, wrist 
flapping, bouncing, hand positioning while reading braille, or even cane 
technique.
“My hope is that it’s going to be a very useful tool to combat some of 
these things that aren’t just for the blind community…but for 
everybody,” Thompson said.
iFidget is still in beta phase. However, when it is released we will be 
sure to update you via this blog.
what do you think about the idea of iFidget? What other activities would 
you like an app to target so as to help your students? Post below in the 
comments!

-- 
David Goldfield,

      Founder and Peer Coordinator,
Philadelphia Computer Users' Group for the Blind and Visually Impaired

Feel free to visit my new Web site
http://www.DavidGoldfield.info/


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