The Design and Prototyping of an App to Teach Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities to Empower Them Against Abuse

In the United States, the abuse of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) is at epidemic proportions. However, the reporting of such abuse has been severely lacking. It has been found that individuals with I/DD are more aware of when and how to report abuse when they have received abuse-prevention training. Consequently, in this article we present the design and prototyping of a mobile-computing app called Recognize that empowers adults with I/DD to independently learn about abuse. To this end, we first conducted an auto-ethnographic co-design of Recognize with individuals and self-advocates from the I/DD community. Next, based on the outcomes from the co-design process, we developed three initial prototype variants of Recognize and performed a preliminary user study with six individuals with I/DD who have experience teaching others with I/DD about abuse. Based on the findings of this preliminary user study, we created a consolidated prototype of Recognize and performed a more detailed qualitative user study with 11 individuals with I/DD who represented the eventual users of Recognize. The participants in this user study found it to be viable for use by individuals with I/DD. We end the article with a discussion of the implications of our findings toward the development of a deployable version of Recognize and similar apps.