Towards a usable serious game app to support children's language therapy

Abstract

Speech and language disorders in children account for about 6% of the population, and if not treated adequately they persist. Thus, affected children may experience long-term problems such as both diminished socialization and literacy in later life. Assistive technologies in the form of serious games have been successfully used to support language and speech therapies, but their developers have the challenge of improving their human-computer interfaces. This paper describes the design and development of a mobile software (a serious game app) that runs on a tablet. Its main objective is to support children's speech and language therapy of English language tenses. Important usability testing and design guidelines regarding mobile interfaces are addressed. Future work will include usability testing based on the user-centered design (UCD) paradigm and prototyping to improve its interface design.