KFI_16

About the project

In recent years more and more parents have gone to the paediatrician complaining that their child has learning difficulties. Several factors can contribute to such complaints. On the one hand, in today's fast-paced world children receive a great deal of new information that they cannot always process properly. On the other hand, children often do not play in a way suited to their age, either at home or in kindergarten, and as a result their various abilities do not develop properly or evenly.

Such partial skill disorders very often lie behind learning problems. Uneven development often means that, for a while, the child compensates for a weakness in one area with an ability that develops faster (for example, in the early school years good memory compensates for less developed logical skills). Over time, however, this compensation becomes harder, and its failure can lead to psychological problems on the one hand and learning problems on the other. In most cases this is the real explanation why a child with excellent marks in grades 1–2 gets worse and worse marks in grades 4–5 — not the often-mentioned adolescence or a bad teacher.

Our goal is to develop and clinically test a medical diagnostic and development methodology and a toolset built on state-of-the-art sensor and software technology that can have a real developmental effect on these areas in a complex way suited to today's social trends — on the devices children use often, in a motivating and entertaining form. With the development programmes we can also effectively support children aged 6–14, for whom the currently available, mainly movement-based methods are no longer effective enough.

To achieve this goal, our company won a HUF 220 million grant under the Support for R&D&I Activities of Enterprises programme (Vállalati KFI_16) for the project „Research into partial skill disorders and creation of a complex medical diagnostic and development toolset”. The project started on 2 January 2018 and is expected to be completed by 31 December 2019.