Changing Family Practices with Assistive Technology

Abstract

Families of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often report morning and bedtime routines to be stressful and frustrating. Through a design process involving domain professionals and families we designed MOBERO, a smartphone-based system that assists families in establishing healthy morning and bedtime routines with the aim to assist the child in becoming independent and lowering the parents' frustration levels. In a two-week intervention with 13 children with ADHD and their families, MOBERO significantly improved children's independence and reduced parents' frustration levels. Additionally, use of MOBERO was associated with a 16.5% reduction in core ADHD symptoms and an 8.3% improvement in the child's sleep habits, both measured by standardized questionnaires. Our study highlights the potential of assistive technologies to change the everyday practices of families of children with ADHD.

A Follow-up Study of a Successful Assistive Technology for Children with ADHD and Their Families

“…MOBERO (presented in more detail in [23]) is a mobile application that assists parents and children with ADHD to establish healthy morning and bedtime routines, as these situations can often cause frustration [8,19]. We designed and developed MOBERO though an iterative design process involving parents, children with ADHD and ADHD domain professionals as described in [23].…”

“…MOBERO (presented in more detail in [23]) is a mobile application that assists parents and children with ADHD to establish healthy morning and bedtime routines, as these situations can often cause frustration [8,19]. We designed and developed MOBERO though an iterative design process involving parents, children with ADHD and ADHD domain professionals as described in [23]. As ADHD is highly hereditable [3] and because we learned from our empirical studies that parents' engagement was critical in changing children's morning and bedtime routines, we included routines for parents as well as children in MOBERO [23].…”

“…We designed and developed MOBERO though an iterative design process involving parents, children with ADHD and ADHD domain professionals as described in [23]. As ADHD is highly hereditable [3] and because we learned from our empirical studies that parents' engagement was critical in changing children's morning and bedtime routines, we included routines for parents as well as children in MOBERO [23]. MOBERO consist of two modules; a bedtime module and a morning module.…”

“…The last activity is a reward that consists of a physical fluorescent star, which the child can place on a laminated A4-sized paper chart as seen on Figure 2 and further described in [23].…”

“…In the first phase of our study, MOBERO was initially evaluated with 13 children with ADHD and their families. This one-month study was divided into a two-week baseline period and a two-week intervention period where the families used MOBERO as reported in [23] In this paper, we report on new findings from the second phase of our MOBERO study, a one-month follow-up study. Furthermore, we report on insights into family practices and unexpected outcomes of these from both the first and second phase of the study.…”