According to the World Health Organisation’s World Report on Hearing, there is a strong need to provide better education on hearing loss from a young age. This project aims to educate the Danish young population (13 to 17-year-olds) about the hearing sense through an educational multiplayer virtual reality-based escape room with the benefits of educational escape rooms. In collaboration with relevant audiologist stakeholders, this project follows an iterative process of design, implementation, and evaluation of the application. The developed solution will undergo several user studies in the following months.

We present DuoRhythmo, a collaborative accessible digital musical interface (CADMI) that gives people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (PALS) the experience of remotely and collaboratively creating music in real-time. We designed DuoRhythmo specifically to be utilized for eye tracking and optimized it for head- and computer mouse interaction, as well using a user-centered design approach. Together with five PALS, we completed a mixed-methods evaluation to assess the accessibility of DuoRhythmo. Participants described the CADMI using the Microsoft Desirability Toolkit (MDT) as fun, empowering, accessible, easy to use, engaging, and stimulating and gave an average System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 79.5. We suggest further research on remote collaboration within the field of accessible digital musical instruments (ADMIs) using the term CADMI to explore the positive effects of collaborative music-making on the quality of life of PALS.

Music Therapy (MT) has shown many benefits in helping autistic children, but some challenges remain due to children’s social anxiety and sensory issues. Yet, very few studies have investigated how Virtual Reality (VR) could help to increase the accessibility of MT approaches. This paper presents an exploratory study investigating the use of VR to perform MT sessions for autistic children with severe learning disabilities and complex needs. The study is performed in terms of acceptability, usability, and social communication. A collaborative MT approach was designed in close collaboration with music therapists from Denmark and psychologists from France, using head-mounted display-based VR. Testing were conducted with thirteen children with various neurodevelopmental conditions and intellectual disabilities at a children’s day hospital in Paris. The results indicate positive acceptability and usability for these children, and suggest a positive effect of MT in VR regarding communication.

We present a demo of Earnormous, a virtual reality game to teach about the human ear.

Although hearing loss is treated with hearing technology and rehabilitation, children with hearing loss still face challenges. Factors such as distance to the sound source and noise from the surroundings are the children’s biggest enemies. In the "Listen Again" project, a listening- and spatial awareness training application was co-designed together with deaf and hard-of-hearing children who use cochlear implants. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative results from a two-month evaluation where 22 children were asked to play with the VR solution for two months, three times a week.

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are becoming more and more adopted for treatment of mental health, especially due to the availability of low cost and usable hardware and software solutions. In this paper we present the views of three teachers on how to use VR to instruct children and adolescents diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). All three teachers work with students diagnosed with ASD on a daily basis. Three categories of skills that would benefit from being taught using VR emerged from the discussion with the teachers: everyday living skills, social skills, and academic skills. Skills within these categories as well as some of the main advantages of VR according to the teachers are discussed in this paper.