Personal hygiene is the first step to support a healthy life style. To ensure better application for personal hygiene, it is important for parents or the community to set the example. For student with mental deficiency, maintaining personal hygiene can be challenging. For this reason, UNY students developed a Personal Hygiene Smart Box as a medium for personal hygiene learning.
Imelda Sari, Valentinus Yoga Wirantoro and Fauzi Fandy Setiawan made this tool to help student with mental deficiency to learn appropriate, concrete, and integrated personal hygiene learning. "One form of developmental barriers in adaptive behaviour for children with mental deficiency is self-development" said Imelda. "The scope of self-development for children intellectual barriers includes caring for themselves, taking care of themselves, communicating, socializing, life skills, and using leisure time".
Personal hygiene is a part of caring for oneself that must be developed as early as possible. This aims to enable children to be independent and able to maintain their own cleanliness. Valentinus Yoga Wirantoro added that based on preliminary studies conducted in several Special Schools in Yogyakarta, most students with specificity in basic mental deficiency had not been able to apply the concept of personal hygiene, such as not being able to comb their hair, unable to wash their hands when going eat, and haven't been able to brush your teeth independently. "Therefore, we designed this smart box as an educational game tool that was intentionally designed specifically for educational purposes," said Yoga. The smart box media will improve child's development, encourage children's activities and creativity, and contain educational values. The learning media called "Smart" because it has integrated use. It can be used to learn some personal hygiene learning at once in one place and time (such as brushing your teeth, washing your face, combing your hair, washing your hands and using a veil, and tidying clothes / shirts) because the media is equipped with a sink and mirror glass.
Fauzi Fandy Setiawan explained, the material needed was aluminium, aquarium glass for making water tanks and mirror glass. "The media is equipped with wheels so they can move and can be used inside or outside the classroom," said Fauzi. "The media is equipped with a sink and mirror so that the media can be used for learning personal hygiene in the upper body". For its use, it still involves the role of teachers and students in the learning process using this media.
This Personal Hygiene Smart Box has been tested at SLB Rela Bhakti Sleman with good results. This work succeeded in gaining Dikti funding through the Research Creativity Program in 2019. (Dedy)
