Misty Campbell is parent of child with complex disabilities who wrote this book as a guide for other families to advocate for their own children with significant disabilities.
As a mother and a pediatrician, I’ve both felt the strain of pandemic parenting directly and indirectly. I’ve made decisions about my own family and sending our kids to daycare and school, and I’ve stayed up worrying about how parents are supposed to make these difficult choices with so little support.
It's important for all of us who are imposed with certain physical boundary conditions to push those boundary conditions as far as possible and maintain as much independence as absolutely possible.
We all have different towns and we all have different things that we do in the course of the day. It may be that the student is a great artist or a great writer. When it comes to assistive technology we have to think about what is going to give that student the ability to do what they love without having to see roadblocks and go, "I can't do that”. There are so many tools out there, whether it's a communication app, a video app, a math tool. With assistive technology you are not making the student into what you want them to be.
Many of our products today have accessibility supports in them to the extent where we don't have to purchase anything else. It's already in there. Your phone, your tablet, your smart home devices. If you're going to look for these features on your devices, you can start in your settings. There should be something in there that says accessibility. Go in there, see what's available. The manufacturers have done a really nice job of describing these features right within the settings to give you a sense of what they're going to do.
The future of science advancements is endless. In this video Dr. Ted Conway discusses the possibility of thought to speech. One of the really interesting areas of research in biomedical engineering is thought to speech. The concept of thought to speech is fairly straightforward, the execution to make this a reality is a little more complicated.