Children with PIMD/SMID expressive behaviors: Development and testing of ChildSIDE app, the first step for independent communication and mobility

TL;DR

This paper introduces ChildSIDE, an innovative app designed to interpret expressive behaviors of children with severe disabilities, facilitating communication and mobility by collecting behavioral and environmental data.

Contribution

The study presents the first development and pilot testing of an app that interprets expressive behaviors of children with PIMD/SMID for communication support.

Findings

ChildSIDE more accurately collected behavior data than paper methods.

The app successfully detected and transmitted over 93% of location and environmental data.

Behaviors mainly involved hand, body movements, and vocalizations.

Abstract

Children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities or severe motor and intellectual disabilities only communicate through movements, vocalizations, body postures, muscle tensions, or facial expressions on a pre- or protosymbolic level. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, hardly any system has been developed to interpret their expressive behaviors. This paper describes the design, development, and testing of ChildSIDE in collecting behaviors of children and transmitting location and environmental data to the database. The movements associated with each behavior were also identified for future system development. ChildSIDE app was pilot tested among purposively recruited child-caregiver dyads. ChildSIDE was more likely to collect correct behavior data than paper-based method and it had >93% in detecting and transmitting location and environment data except for iBeacon data. Behaviors were manifested mainly through hand and body movements and vocalizations.