Inventor: Bang Ming Yong, Institute for Manufacturing
Mentor: TBC
The inventor has been working with Virtual Reality (VR) systems over the past 4 years, investigating their use in a variety of scenarios.
More recently he has been working on the use of VR to help with training approaches to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in partnership with the Association of Resource and Education for Autistic Children (Lions REACh Centre) in Malaysia.
The Lions REACh Centre has successfully used training methodologies to help children with ASD to develop and refine skills for daily life, using role play for tasks like answering the phone and cooking food. The partnership with Bang Ming Yong was developed to help look at tasks that are not easy to do within the safe environment of the Centre, for example going to the supermarket to buy food.
Thanks to a recent GCRF grant, a prototype system has been created with a virtual supermarket where you can go in, choose items from a shelf and pay for them at a till.
The question for the i-Team is what the inventor should do next. By interviewing ASD experts in the fields of medicine, child development, psychology and education, the team will investigate how widely this type of training approach is used, what scenarios should be used with VR to generate the greatest impact, and who the inventor should partner with to further develop and test the software. The team will also look for sources of funding and examine the role that clinical trials and other regulatory requirements might play in the adoption of such a system.