Virtual Home Visits Project

Project Details

Project Context
The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) is dedicated to improving results for infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities ages birth through 21 by providing leadership and financial support to assist states and local districts. The Steppingstones of Technology Innovation for Children with Disabilities, funded through OSEP, requires grantees to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative technology approaches designed to improve results for children with disabilities.

The use of internet video conferencing has become widespread in many fields. Two way audio video distance technologies have been used to monitor and advise patients in the medical arena, to provide speech therapy to young children in their home, and to deliver university coursework to students in their homes. The use of internet video conferencing to deliver intervention services to children with disabilities, ages 0-3, and their parents, is an innovative use of this technology.

Project Focus:
The Virtual Home Visit (VHV) project is funded through an OSEP Steppingstones of Technology Innovation for Children with Disabilities as a Phase 1 development project. Phase 1 projects must develop, refine, and test the feasibility of technology-based approaches. This study will examine the use of desktop conferencing as a mode of providing multidisciplinary early intervention service to young children with disabilities and their parents.

Products/Services:
Virtual Home Visits (VHV) will be delivered to 32 families with children with disabilities age 6 months to 25 months enrolled in an early intervention program in rural northern Utah.

Focus:
First Quarter Focus:
1) Develop the program forms, surveys and participant training curriculum.
2) Choose twelve families to participate to provide critical feedback to the feasibility of using the audio/video distance technologies.

Second Quarter Focus: Collect baseline data.

Third & Fourth Quarters Focus: Conduct monthly virtual home visits.