Design and Usability Evaluation of Visual Perception Game-Based Training System for Children with Developmental Delays

The prevalence of developmental delays is increasing year by year and is common in preschool-aged children with developmental delays, and visual impairment is a common problem in children with developmental delays. Visual development is critical to preschoolers learning. Children with visual problems often have difficulties in picture recognition, image comprehension, and memory, resulting in difficulties in daily living and learning. However, traditional paper-based training is tedious and lacking in interactivity, game training can make up for these problems. Therefore, the objective of this study was to design a visual-perceptual play training system for children with preschool developmental delays, to investigate the usability and perception of the system for children with developmental delays. In this study, the recommendations of the heuristic evaluation were iteratively designed to ensure the functionality of the system. The system will be tested with an eye-tracking device to verify its suitability for use with children with developmental delays and to further suggest considerations and limitations for future research when designing software and interfaces for children with developmental delays. The results of this study showed that the best participants focused on the correct answer and the specified pattern, while the worst participants tended to focus on irrelevant things and had high overall attention on the screen. It was found that for the preferences section of the interface, placing the specified pattern in the center of the interface or closer to the options resulted in better performance of the children's perceptual training, and clearly rewarded feedback kept them motivated to learn and less distracted. The system will continue to be optimized in the future in the hope that it will help pre-schooler’s visual cognitive learning and help parents understand their children's visual ability.