Here is how they work through the lifecycle of the people you serve:

Person-Centered Planning

Flourish
Many agencies include person-centered planning within the career planning and exploration process.  Flourish is an app based on positive psychology to reinvigorate and provide a foundation for the person-centered planning process.

For direct support professionals, Flourish serves as a tool to establish and manage a succinct set of goals for the people they serve to work towards. In addition to helping clients reap the intrinsic value of accomplishing goals, the technology also hosts functionality that helps agencies and organizations meet reporting and documentation requirements.

Flourish also benefits the individual served by providing an outlet to express their individuality; providing a dashboard for their pictures, interests and goals that they carry like a virtual ID on their phones or devices. This, in turn, helps their care providers understand them on a deeper level and customize their interactions to get the most out of their abilities, avoid crises, and create sustainable relationships. 
Flourish Explainer Video: https://youtu.be/UMpkn_1OZ3U 

Pre-Employment and Employment

Employment Pathfinder 
Employment Pathfinder helps job developers, employment specialists, and counselors quickly assess the job seeker’s readiness, job interests, and relative skills. The job seeker uses the Employment Pathfinder App, while staff weigh in using the companion cloud-based dashboard. 

This helps create a comprehensive assessment that leads to a detailed report describing any gap areas and the strategies, tactics and tools they might use to bridge them. 

Ever since the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act (WIOA) was signed into law in 2014, staff have used a variety of methods to help fulfill the ‘Gold Standard’ of Competitive Integrated Employment – real jobs, with real wages. Employment Pathfinder pulls these strategies together into one integrated platform. The system is designed around the principles of self-determination and informed choice to help the job seeker play an active role in the career discovery and planning process.  
Employment Pathfinder Explainer Video: https://youtu.be/aIK3SBItQFM 

Non-Invasive Surveillance 

Evalu8NOW
Evalu8NOW is a series of web-based, avatar-led assessments and interventions that allow job coaches the ability to monitor important mental health criteria that may influence the employee’s work performance and/or satisfaction with their job.  Avatars provide a neutral and non-intrusive surveying environment for the employee that yields honest answers and increases data integrity. In turn, Evalu8NOW allows job coaches the ability to check in with employees at a much higher frequency than before, thus, yielding more transparency into the setbacks and challenges and employee might be experiencing in between scheduled visits. Ultimately, job coaches become privy to real-time data and get the opportunity to ward off crises before it happens and increase the efficacy of their person-centered plan.
Evalu8NOW Explainer video:  https://youtu.be/2BCkd9RHXGQ 

Typical ADL or On- the- job task prompting 

MeMinder
MeMinder, an assistive technology used in both the residential and employment setting, is a dynamic, talking pictures to-do list that both prompts and provides instructions for daily tasks. Ideally developed to fade from human to natural supports, MeMinder affords employees the ability to get the instructions they need in the format best-suited for them:  full video modeling (when they need details on how to perform a task), talking pictures format, to audio-only sequences of prompts (as they become familiar with the tasks).

The Task Tracker Dashboard affords job coaches the ability to view completed, time-stamped tasks and monitor both progress and setbacks of one – or many – employees in real-time. In addition, its voice-to-text task analysis allows easy task setup and job coaches can pull pre-created tasks from a library of 200+ tasks, a shared/public repository of tasks, or simply create and record their own, custom tasks.
MeMinder Explainer Video: https://youtu.be/LTC56auYUUg 

Emotional Regulation  

OnTracker 
Frequently, people with IDDs also have challenging behaviors which can disrupt the process of establishing and achieving their goals. 

In answer to this challenge, CreateAbility has developed OnTracker; an app that monitors whether the person’s thoughts and actions are aligned with their current goals. By running on popular Apple and Android tablets, OnTracker is a coach they can check in with 24/7 to help them self-regulate after experiencing an emotional triggering event, such as a conflict with a roommate or co-worker, or missing a bus on a rainy day.

After rating their feelings, the app enables them to employ the appropriate ‘skills’ to help them independently cope with their situation. The skillset includes important criteria such as creating a clear picture of a particular situation, putting emotions in perspective, taking positive actions, problem solving, relationship care…and more!
OnTracker Explainer Video:  https://youtu.be/dMa5xiByZYg 

Communication  

AvaTalk interactive communication portal
Frequently, the people in the circle of care around the individual served with an IDD prefer to communicate via text messaging, while the individual served prefers other forms of communication. Avatalk may be a solution in these scenarios. A slide show of pictures of favorite people and memories helps keep the person calm. When the team wishes to check in with the individual, they send a text with the question-and-answer choices, and this gets rendered as their favorite avatar, which speaks the question-and-answer choices, and returns the selected answer as text.
How it Works: https://youtu.be/d0-nn8hSfW0

The post Enabling Technology Through the Lifecycle of the People You Serve appeared first on CreateAbility Inc.

Antiquated, printed copies of care plans on are not mobile - and are not as easily changed as the person-served accomplishes their goals. Assistive technology grants individuals with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to feel more a part of the planning process as they carry it with them to help keep them on track.   

2.) Assistive Technology provides accessibility.   

Mobile technology opens the door for text-to speech; allowing  individuals who are print-challenged to “play” each section of  their plan. The user experience can be enhanced by enabling the person-served to independently select the specific section of interest that they wish to listen to. This helps prevent overwhelming them with too much information at once.   

3.) Assistive Technology provides succinct, actionable steps to a customized care plan.   

Care plans should not be approached as a one-size-fits-all solution and manual processes like creating written instructions, manuals, and binders take time and energy that could be spent elsewhere. Assistive technology provides a more malleable platform to establish and manage care plans that are more customized to the individual.    

4.) Assistive Technology is remotely supportable by Care Providers and Job Coaches.   

Assistive technology has afforded Care Providers with the ability to communicate with clients and monitor setbacks and progress in their person-centered care plan ANY TIME and ANYWHERE.  This is a big advancement in the quality of care that Care Providers and Vocational Rehabilitation agencies/organizations can offer their clients. It has equipped them with virtual “eyes” inside the homes of the people they serve without being intrusive to their lives.   

If you are looking to simplify and/or increase the efficacy of your person-centered plans with clients, we encourage you to check out FLOURISH, CreateAbility’s new app that helps you establish, manage goals…and helps your clients achieve them!

The post 4 Ways Assistive Technology Benefits Person-Centered Planning appeared first on CreateAbility Inc.

What’s worse is that because I can’t say no, I say yes. I say yes, A LOT. It seems that the only people that I say no to are those that I love and care for the most. That’s something I know that I need to work on and recently kept me up at night thinking of ways to fix it.

It makes perfect sense that for every “yes”, there must be a “no” to counterbalance it. Let’s face it, we can’t do it, buy it, or __________ it ALL.  (You fill in the blank here with your own time-sucking activity here.)

I call this process the “yes / no seesaw” effect.

So if it boils down to the fact that your “yes” results in a “no”, it would benefit us to choose your “yes” most wisely. If so, what should be the foundation of your “yes”?  (If only we had a measuring stick for how and why we decide our commitments.) For the sake of both efficiency and efficacy, it would make the most sense to align our yeses with our own, personal goals as the end result = increased life satisfaction.

There has never been a simpler concept that is harder to put into practice than aligning your thoughts, emotions, and especially commitments to your goals, right? If it’s difficult for me – I can’t imagine how hard it would be for a person with executive functioning challenges that already experiences difficulty prioritizing tasks, gets overly emotional, fixates on things and has trouble managing their time.

THIS idea, right here, was the foundation for the development of CreateAbility’s OnTracker assistive technology. This solution helps people with intellectual developmental disabilities establish and manage their goals through self-regulation skills. Examples are shifting perspective outward vs. getting caught up in internal struggle, recognizing triggers and establishing boundaries that better align everyday activities and emotions with their own goals. (Our OnTracker pilot study has yielded some amazing results!)

I, personally, have been applying the methodology behind OnTracker to my own life and wow…has it helped me accomplish so much more! While I have to manage just myself, I have extra empathy for DSPs who are not only responsible for the alignment of “yes” responses to goals in their own lives – but also those of the people they serve. The latter is the part we’d love to relieve you of – so you still have the output and energy to take care of YOU, especially in these times. Our Flourish technology solution will help you establish goals for your clients and OnTracker will help them control their responses to life’s stressors so that they can align their action to their goals.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a demo of what OnTracker can do for both the people you serve…and YOU.

As always, we are here to serve you!

Steve

This blog was inspired from an article from CJ McClanahan in 2019.

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