Visual Schedule: A Mobile Application for Autistic Children - Preliminary Study

Abstract

Children with autism often experience considerable challenges and one of them is the difficulty in understanding, structuring and predicting their daily life activities and routines. Several methodologies have been studied and implemented to help autistic children with these routine activities and tasks, and one of those methods is the use of visual schedules. For this, mobile apps and related technology have been considered as an excellent tool in supporting autistic children’s development. But despite the technological resources and the variety of mobile apps available today, the authors could not find such needed resources available for the Portuguese speaking autistic children population, especially in relation to visual schedules/routines, which are considered very important for the child’s development. Therefore, based on the literature and in some apps available in other countries for autistic children, the authors propose a set of mock-ups of a visual schedule application for smartphone. The visual mock-ups represent the idea of the app that we intend to implement in a near future to be used by Portuguese autistic children aged between 4 to 10 years old to support them in their daily routine and the performance of related tasks.