Moutaz Saleh

A combined Cognitive Multimedia Model for children with intellectual disabilities

Children with Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities are often faced with intellectual disorders ranging from mild to severe. This study proposes a multimedia-based learning model which combines Mayers Cognitive Multimedia Learning Model with Skinners Operant Conditioning, and involves implementing phonological awareness in the learning process. This is implemented with the use of animated multimedia tutorials and exercises allow children with Down syndrome and other disabilities an improved learning opportunity. This system is tested on a group of 100 disabled children and results have indicated increased levels of motivation and high relative performance scores.

Adaptive ubiquitous mobile gaming system for youth obesity rehabilitation

Obesity is one of the rise and among the top health risk factors in the world affecting people of all ages. It can lead to many problems including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, functional limitations, and disabilities which adversely affect the social and physical abilities of the obese person in daily affairs. While the rising trend of obesity in adults is a serious problem, the rise of obesity in youths is even more severe. Various recent studies have indicated that youth obesity has become so widespread that, if left unaddressed, it would have severe implications on the society health, productivity, and economy. This paper proposes a multiplayer ubiquitous gaming system which unveil the hidden potential within obese youth and improve their skills and physical activities and get them healthy. This is intended to be done through the use of mobile wireless sensors, to provide real time monitoring of the patient bio signals and to suggest suitable actions in terms of physical activity. The system is aimed to engage and encourage youth, particularly in the State of Qatar, in their obesity rehabilitation process, increase their social activities, and help them get healthy in an entertaining way while reinforcing positive exercise habits.

A Fully Accessible Arabic Learning Platform for Assisting Children with Intellectual Challenges

Children with intellectual challenges (IC) are growing up with wide exposure to computer technology. Computer software and assistive devices have the potential to help these children in their education, career development, and independent living. In spite of the current spread of the use of computers in education in the Arab world, complete suites of solutions for children with IC are very scarce. This paper presents a fully accessible Arabic learning platform for assisting IC children in the State of Qatar. The platform provides four main components which are divided into learning management content, multimedia educational tutorials, edutainment games, and ontology-based learning with the aim of enhancing those children skills, understanding, communications, and memorization skills, while overcoming their obesity problems. The effectiveness of the proposed platform has been tested on IC children, and the results show clear advances on such children’s learning capabilities and improved largely their performance.

Learning games for children with intellectual challenges

This paper discuss the design of the current educational tutorials and games which are developed for children with intellectual challenges who are resident in the Shafallah center for children with special needs in Doha, Qatar. These edutainment games teach the children using multimedia elements to improve their memorization skills and proactivity. Five games have been so far developed and being evaluated. These games teach the children about counting, healthy food, home objects, fruits & vegetables. The designed games characters are selected from the local environment as the children are familiar with them. Whenever the game is completed successfully, the child will get a virtual gift of different values based on the time he/she spent on the game and the number of right selections to reach a solution. This gift will be added to the childs virtual space and can be substituted by a higher value gift whenever the child improves his/her performance and completes the game in a shorter time. This concept challenges the children to try to get always the best gift while learning in a funny and enjoyable way.

An arabic ontology-based learning system for children with intellectual challenges

Children with intellectual challenges (IC) are growing up with extensive exposure to computer technology. Computer software and assistive devices have the potential to help these children in education, career development, and independent living. However, most of the software, tools and web sites that these children interact with are designed without consideration of their special needs, making these elements less effective or completely inaccessible for them. This paper proposes an assistive education system that dynamically generates multimedia tutorials for children with IC in the state of Qatar. We use several techniques to generate the tutorials which include: Arabic text processing, entities relationship extraction, multimedia-based ontology, and online retrieval of multimedia contents. The main aim of our system is to enhance those children learning capabilities, understanding, communications, thinking and memorization skills through multimedia.

An integrated e-learning system for MID and MLD children in Qatar

Children with Moderate Intellectual Disability (MID) and those with Moderate Learning Disability (MLD) are growing up with extensive exposure to computer technology. Computers and computer-related devices have the potential to help these children in education, career development, and independent living. However, most of the software, games, and web sites that MID and MLD children interact with are designed without consideration of their special needs, making the applications less effective or completely inaccessible. This paper proposes a fully accessible integrated e-learning system for MID and MLD children in Qatar state with the aim of enhancing children learning capabilities, understanding, communications, thinking and memorization skills.

An Arabic-Based Tutorial System for Children with Special Needs

Abstract In spite of the current proliferation of the use of computers in education in the Arab world, complete suites of solutions for students with special needs are very scarce. This paper presents an assistive system managing learning content for children with moderate to mild intellectual disabilities. The system provides educational multimedia contents, inspired from the local environment, in different subjects such as math, science, religion, daily life skills, and others to target specific learning goals suitable for this group of learners. The system tracks the individual student progress against the student individualized learning plan assigned by the specialized teacher and according to the learner abilities. Upon completion of learning a particular task, the system will test the learner to order a set of sub-tasks in its logical sequence necessary to successfully accomplish the main task. The system also facilitates deploying intelligent tutoring algorithms to automatically correct mistakes af...