Hollman Facilitations: A user-friendly tool of supporting children with visual impairment and their families in daily life.

The Robert Hollman Foundation (RHF) designed "Hollman Facilitations" (HF), a user-friendly way of supporting children with visual impairment (VI) and their families on a daily basis. This tool consists of specifically designed pictures on simple A4 sheets, which highlight with images and captions the key aspects of these children's everyday lives. Professionals can easily modify Hollman Facilitations to customize them to the unique developmental needs of every single child with VI and to their individualized strengths and weaknesses. This type of support acts as a reminder, to help families keep in mind what is essential for their children with VI in everyday life. HF are also useful for professionals because they give a clear, at-a-glance overview of the needs of visually impaired children, helping their communication with their families. In order to understand the perceived effectiveness of this tool, a questionnaire was designed and sent to 49 families, asking their opinions and satisfaction levels regarding its clarity, adequacy, usability and usefulness. 36 parents answered reporting overall very high satisfaction levels. A second questionnaire was sent to 29 RHF professionals to collect their opinions regarding HF usability and usefulness and the majority of them was very satisfied of its use in their daily work. This data supports overall this tool, which can be also easily replicated and also potentially used in other settings, beyond the field of visual impairment. •HF support children with VI and their families substantially and works as a reminder of what the professionals found in their consultations, to be fundamental for the children to promote the use of their functional vision and their strengths and to consequently improve the quality of their daily lives•HF favour a better communication between health professionals and families of children with VI, sharing therapeutic indications through the adoption of a customized, user-friendly, everyday tool by integrating pictures and text with oral communication•HF help professionals to identify strategies that best promote the overall development of children with visual impairment and to express them in an understandable way.

Parental Satisfaction with the Quality of Care in an Early Intervention Service for Children with Visual Impairment: A Retrospective Longitudinal Study.

The fundamental role of vision during development and the nurturing role of early intersubjectivity have enabled the Robert Hollman Foundation to develop an early intervention program providing holistic support to visually impaired children and their families, where fostering parent-infant interactions is at the heart of our care. The aim of this study is to understand how parents perceive this approach. It is an eleven-year retrospective study of children following the Robert Hollman Foundation's early intervention program, in which parents' (n = 1086) perceptions of quality of care were measured through the administration of a specifically designed 4-point scale questionnaire. Annual longitudinal trends of parents' perceptions were calculated for every single response. Parents reported a very high satisfaction value in 21/23 questions (Mean > 3.7 out of a maximum score of 4, with the highest scores in human and soft skills of professionals) with a statistically positive trend (p < 0.05), throughout the period considered. Our core approach, based on an individualized nurturing relational support, has been appreciated and confirmed by the high satisfaction reported in the questionnaires by parents of children with visual impairment. We therefore hypothesize that parent-infant relationship-based and individualized approaches may help parents achieve better health, well-being, and quality of daily life for their children.

Co-designed mini-games for children with visual impairment: a pilot study on their usability.

Digital games aimed at improving cognitive and/or motor-sensory skills need to be carefully designed to take into account the characteristics and needs of particular categories of users. Several novel mini-games explicitly aimed at children with visual impairment (VI) were co-designed by a multidisciplinary team which involved computer engineers and a therapy team from the Robert Hollman Foundation (Padova, Italy). These games are played by children moving within a large-scale interactive environment - i.e., a floor portion placed under a motion capture system capable of tracking one or more people - with the game linking the players movements to the audio and visual output to produce meaningful interactions. We report on a pilot study of the usability of the system involving 11 children with VI. The results allowed us to improve the system and to define a set of guidelines useful for designers and developers of similar systems. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11042-022-13665-7.

Distance support and online intervention to blind and visually impaired children during the pandemic COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed dramatic changes to everyone's daily routines, but especially to children with developmental disabilities. The Robert Hollman Foundation decided not to interrupt its service to all the visually impaired children and initiated a Distance Support Project. It was an online process covering all aspects of support for the children and involving audio-video calls, videos and tailored-made multisensory material created specifically for each child. A questionnaire, carried out after the 5-month project duration, was created to collect feedback from parents and professionals to understand the impact this project had on everyone involved. Overall both parents and professionals indicated high levels of satisfaction, but in a significant number of questions parents reported consistently higher levels of satisfaction (p-value <0.001). It was shown that parents felt reassured at this otherwise very difficult time because their children were able to continue their treatment, even if in a very different way. This fact encourages us to consider enriching our existing programmes of support and care, integrating this online approach when necessary. At the same time, it seems clear that the responses of the professionals indicate their belief that the benefits of the traditional ways of working remain of unquestionable importance for children with sight deprivation.

Comparison of temporal judgments in sighted and visually impaired children.

AIM: We studied visually impaired and blind children to investigate the effects of visual damage on time perception. METHODS: Sixty-three children (11 blind, 16 visually impaired, 20 sighted and 16 sighted but blindfolded) performed a temporal bisection task, which consisted of judging different temporal intervals presented in the auditory modality. RESULTS: The visually impaired children showed lower constant error than sighted children but higher variability (Weber ratio). The blindfolded children had a temporal estimation comparable to the clinical groups and time sensitivity comparable to the controls. CONCLUSION: These findings are interpreted in the light of inter-modality interference, assuming that the coexistence of both sensory modalities, present only in controls, leads to a trade-off between the two senses with an indirect contribution of sight, which does not happen either in the clinical groups or in the blindfolded children, despite the single sensory task.