Wizards and Unicorns

For the next couple of weeks, Abby gets to test out the Dynavox Eyemax.  It's one of the three eye gaze communicators that are options for her to get sometime in the hopefully near future.  I picked it up yesterday, but was unable to get it calibrated until today.  I don't know if it is her glasses, or what, but it's not easy to get calibrated for her.  After much trying, we finally got it up and working this afternoon.  I am not familiar with this device and I honestly don't know much about setting up the pages for Abby to use.  If you don't set up your own pages, Abby can only use the preset pages, which are not very exciting or meaningful to her.  If we went with this device, I would make lots of pages that she would like better than the presets.  She did find one page that she liked.  I would not have guessed that she would find wizards and unicorns so entertaining, but what do I know?  I hope she remembers where she found this game because I have no idea.   

The screen is blown out at first, but gets better after a few seconds.  

For those of you not familiar with eye gaze technology, here is my understanding of how it works.  There is a bar/sensor at the bottom of the monitor that emits a ray that is reflected off Abby's retina.....I think.  We set up how long Abby looks at something before it is selected.  When her eye gaze "dwells" on something for the determined amount of time, it is selected.  

I am not sure what I think about the Dynavox yet.  I do know that I don't really like how it is set up-very labor intensive for the person setting up pages, which would be me.  I would still be giving her choices that I think she might want to say in a given situation.  I am hoping to find something that would give her even more freedom, but ultimately it will be up to her.  One of the other devices is set up without so many limitations, so maybe that will work better.  Time will tell which device will be the best fit.