Development of Smart Devices Applications for Autistic Children

By the development and diffusion of smart phones, such as iPhone or Android, there are attempts to adopt smart phones as supporting tools for handicapped children recently. We developed a schedule application, "Smiley". We aimed to give the user an opportunity to feel a sense of accomplishment and a motive to try something by him/herself by using this application. Based on this application, we developed new applications called "Iikoto Ippai" and "1punpun"."Iikoto-Ippai" is an application to be use as a token economy tool for the purpose of support to enhance the autonomy and independence of autistic children. Token economy is a method to give a token when someone do appropriate behavior and reward him/her when he/she collects curtain amount of tokens. By using this application repeatedly, they feel not only the joy to get the reward, but also the meaning to achieve the goal and began to make more efforts. "1punpun" is a timer application for teachers of special support schools to use when they give instructions of activities and works to autistic children. Some autistic children tend to become anxious or panic when they cannot understand length of the time of activities or works. This application can provide a visual representation of the time. They began to understand the processes by using this application and were able to finish works by set time without causing a panic. In this study, we examine autism and its education for the handicapped children. Further, we explain the important points to develop these applications. Then we describe the usage instructions and functions of them. In the latter half of this paper, we show the data of the hearing investigation, which was carried out at a special support school in Aichi, Japan.