Wii Activities at the Raphaël Center (4, rue Morand, 75011 Paris)

This center welcomes young people with multiple disabilities with co-occurring brain and motor-function disorders.

Two facilitators from the E-Seniors Association (Jean-Michel and Daoud) have specially adapted Wii handle joysticks and designed a peripheral device – a kind of LED-pen which produces light when switched on – to allow persons with multiple disabilities (who have difficulty using their hands) to interface with a Wii console or computer.

Playing with the Wii.

One of the difficulties encountered by children with disabilities when playing games on the console stems from the presence of numerous buttons on the joystick. These will often be pressed in a highly chaotic or random fashion. Jean-Michel has fashioned a joystick which makes these buttons inaccessible, thus allowing the children to play simple games such as bowling or plane ride.

Drawing with the LED-Pen.

With MS Paint and a PC hooked up to a video-projector, the children can draw on an image projected in large format on a screen or wall. Although they can do this by using the Wii joystick, the precision of the lines and colorations is severely limited. This is why Jean-Michel and Daoud created two LED-pen prototypes with which the children can draw directly onto the projected image as if with a real paintbrush (crayon, pencil, paint-pot, etc. brush functions).