A huggable communication medium can provide sustained listening support for special needs students in a classroom

Poor listening ability is a serious problem for pupils who suffer from a wide range of developmental disabilities. Although recent advances in technology provide such pupils with supportive systems that improve educational acoustic environments, they do not support their mental stress while they are listening in classrooms. Our current study proposes a huggable communication medium to reduce mental stress of listeners in addition to preparing a better acoustic environment. We investigated its impact on pupils with special needs and long-term use. Special needs pupils listened to their teachers or classmates in a general listening situation and in another situation where they listened through a huggable communication medium called Hugvie for three months. We used a memory test to evaluate listening performances and questionnaires about "intention to use" to evaluate acceptance to Hugvie for long-term use. The results showed that listening through Hugvies improved the scores of memory tests about information provided by teachers. In particular, the scores of distracted pupils with emotional problems tended to greatly improve. The improvement of their memory test scores continued for three months. The pupils' impressions of Hugvies also indicated their preference for long-term use. These findings suggest that a huggable communication medium can support the classroom listening of special needs pupils in their daily school life.