CalmReminder: A Design Probe for Parental Engagement with Children with Hyperactivity, Augmented by Real-Time Motion Sensing with a Watch

TL;DR

CalmReminder is a watch-based system that detects children's calm moments with ADHD and delivers personalized prompts, showing parents actively adapt interventions to fit their parenting styles over a four-week study.

Contribution

We introduce a real-time calm detection system and provide empirical insights into how parents personalize digital interventions for children with ADHD.

Findings

Parents perceive notifications during calm moments.

Parents use notifications for praise, mindfulness, and planning.

Parents actively reshape intervention use.

Abstract

Families raising children with ADHD often experience heightened stress and reactive parenting. While digital interventions promise personalization, many remain one-size-fits-all and fail to reflect parents' lived practices. We present CalmReminder, a watch-based system that detects children's calm moments and delivers just-in-time prompts to parents. Through a four-week deployment with 16 families (twelve completed) of children with ADHD, we compared notification strategies ranging from hourly to random to only when the child was inferred to be calm. Our sensing-based notifications were frequently perceived as arriving during calm moments. More importantly, parents adopted the system in diverse ways: using notifications for praise, mindfulness, activity planning, or conversation. These findings show that parents are not passive recipients but active designers, reshaping interventions to fit their parenting styles. We contribute a calm detection pipeline, empirical insights into families' flexible appropriation of notifications, and design implications for intervention systems that foster agency.