Abstract:

Adults with cerebral palsy (CP) struggle with developmental movement and posture impairments that limit their everyday activities. These impairments have a massive effect on their functioning and quality of life. The cognitive, social, and personality aspects of their development lack experiences every non-disabled person goes through. Their physical handicap significantly undermines their routine functioning in various life situations and directly affects their ability to participate in the social, community, and employment scenes.

The technological development and the innovations in assistive technology offer new opportunities. Technology enables disabled individuals to manage and organize information independently, granting them thinking autonomy and an opportunity to manage their environment according to their preferences. Personal information management (PIM) includes the ability to save, organize, retrieve, and share information, and has functional, emotional, and cognitive aspects in life activities.

The pilot study explores the role of PIM as perceived by 3 adults with CP (27-32). We used a qualitative methodology and held in-depth interviews and guided tours on computers and cell phones.

The preliminary findings indicate that PIM constitutes a central portion of their lives: "always with the laptop, if I lose it, I am done for, I do everything with it, it is on 25 hours a day, and everything is there… it is my connection to the outside world". The findings reveal two main aspects:
Functional and cognitive aspects

The interviews revealed that PIM facilitates access: "I take online lessons … this is good for people like me because I don't have to go there", "It's a live lesson that is later uploaded to the site. You can go back and forth as much as you like [on my laptop]". PIM makes up for the lacking information management experience due to the physical disability: "I save on a disk-on-key, on the computer, on 'Drive. And transfer it if I need to show it". There are indications that the PIM prompts cognitive processes of knowledge construction. It enables interacting with knowledge, gathering information, creating and sharing new information, and contemplating it critically: "There are all kinds of things here … [if] I think this is not so good, I post and write something of my own".
Emotional and social aspects

The digital space enables displaying knowledge in areas of personal interest and activity: "This allows other people to see what I have painted and watch my work, and this is important to me". "Facebook reflects me". Interestingly, the information space also enables a reflective internal discourse: I write letters to people, which I write for myself and never post. Things I wanted to say and couldn't".

It also turned up that the digital social networks are a venue for social encounters: "I am on Facebook quite a lot, I enter to see what people share and share with them as well". D. met her husband on Facebook "He entered my profile and then wrote to me, 'Hey, I watched your wall and liked your writing a lot".

In summary, for adults with physical impairments, the functional, cognitive, emotional and social significance of digital activities is exceptionally high given their inability to participate physically in such activities. Extending the research to include other adults would enable examining the associations between this significance and their functioning at work, in their studies, and in society.

Keywords:

Personal information management, Cerebral Palsy.