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GROWING NEED FOR ONLINE REMEDY
Sunday Star, Oct 9, 2005
PARENTS and trainers who work with children with physical disabilities now have an online avenue for learning rehabilitation exercises for children.
GROW (Growing Rehabilitation Opportunities via Web), a programme under the Malaysian Council for Rehabilitation, has just completed the Bahasa Malaysia version of its portal. This community-based project seeks to share rehabilitation information using ICT (information and communication technology).
Through its portal at www.grow.org.my, GROW teaches Malaysians how to spot development problems in children as well as what can be done.
GROW has completed Stage One of this project thanks to the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry’s DAGS (Demonstrator Application Grant Scheme).
The RM1.4mil grant was given in 2003 and only recently was the portal completed, and the GROW committee members say that there are plans to have an English version available as well.
Says GROW operations manager Dr Aminah Bee Mohd Kassim, “It’s about learning rehab through the Web.
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Dr Aminah with her daughter Zahidah Daud who has cerebral palsy and Tan |
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Things like how to do an activity and how to spot problems. Currently a lot of NGOs have a lot of rehabilitation information such as where you can find specific equipment, but nothing on how to perform an activity. This is something that, previously, you would have had to learn from a therapist.
“What we have here are basic things that parents can actually do. Now, we can train them online as well as offline.”
Training
Project consultant Eugenie Tan explains that the offline training is something that the Malaysian Council for Rehabilitation conducts for communities and NGOs.
Under the Social Welfare Department, there are currently 290 centres run by the communities themselves. They have their own training but for children with physical movement problems they may need extra training, explains Dr Aminah.
“So we go from state to state doing the training. But this portal would be a tool that participants can fall back on once we have left, rather than just rely on textbooks. Sometimes textbooks are good, but when you read about the motions, you don’t actually get it. This portal offers the animation and video to demonstrate how the activity is performed,” she says.
GROW opted to have the site in Bahasa Malaysia to begin with because it felt that there are already many resources available in English but not much in Bahasa, says Dr Aminah. “And we were targeting the Jabatan Kebajikan Masyarakat centres, which are almost all from the Malay-speaking community.”
Early intervention
GROW’s aim, says Tan, is to spread early intervention awareness so that parents can identify early that the child has a problem. Some parents only bring their children to the rehabilitation centres when the child is 10 years old or so, she says.
“By the time they come forward the child is already at school-going age so they have missed this huge developmental area. If we don’t start them on rehabilitation early, then they have lost a lot of mileage,” says Tan.
Dr Aminah explains that from the guide at the GROW portal, parents can see what sort of movement and other developments their child should be making from as early as a few months old.
The portal also offers activities that can be conducted if the child’s development is delayed.
“So it offers something that you can do to help the child’s development. You try it, and if it’s not working then you know you have to go get help,” she says.
Tan agrees, adding that if the instructions at the portal are not clear then parents and teachers can call the Malaysian Council for Rehabilitation. The council’s trainers can then better explain or even show them how to perform an activity.
PLANS TO INCLUDE DEAF, BLIND AND ELDERLY
WITH all the information available at the GROW portal, it might be surprising that it is still not launched officially.
Project consultant Eugenie Tan says: “After getting it done, we were supposed to say we are ready now. But then we also realised it is only in Bahasa, so are we ready when the public comes in and it’s not in English? That’s why we are translating it now and doing the same work for the English version so that it fits into the system.”
This is where the GROW council hit a snag.
The grant money has been entirely used up on hardware, software and the setting up of the whole system behind this website, which also features videos and animation.
Part of that funding went into setting up computers and an Internet connection in a few Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) centres in Gombak where the pilot project was conducted.
This was to gauge how effective the website would be when used in a real-life situation and to obtain feedback.
But there is a lot more to be done.
Says Dr Aminah: “We have covered children – 0 to seven years old. But there are still other aspects that have still not been covered.
“For example, we have only covered children with physical problems. We haven’t touched on children with visual problems.”
Part of the reason that the deaf and blind were not included in Stage One of GROW is that their respective local bodies, such as the Malaysian Association for the Blind, already have their own programmes to help parents spot development problems and to help in early intervention.
“What we need to do is to link from our portal to their website for certain things that are already available. We don’t want to reinvent, so we will link with the projects that are already online,” says Dr Aminah.
Stage Two, says Tan, will involve having an English version of the site as well as including information or links to resources for the blind and the deaf. It will also include a section on the elderly.
Tan says that exercises and therapy for the elderly is an important area because the population of elderly is growing significantly.
According to a report by associate professor Dr John T. Arokiasamy of the Department of Social & Preventive Medicine at University Malaya’s Faculty of Medicine (www5.jaring.my/gem/epidemo.htm), the elderly aged 60 years and over in Malaysia are projected to increase to about four million (11.3% of the population) by the year 2020.
With this rapid growth of an ageing population, GROW is aware that there will be a demand for information on therapy for the elderly as well as resources on how to handle various physical problems for senior citizens.
Hopefully in the future more information on rehabilitation exercises will be just a click away.
Copyright Star Publications (M) Bhd
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