Assistive technology app to help children and young people with intellectual disabilities to improve autonomy for using public transport

Abstract

Children and young adults with intellectual disabilities experience problems to go from one place to another using public transport because of the complexity of its network. Different learning activities are practiced in order to make them learn a path and to take the right bus. For example, the creation of small paper books as learning tools which describe the actions to do in a chaining way using pictograms, texts, colors, landmarks, photos and times. Additionally, specialists do the path as many times as it is necessary with the children completing the learning process. However, unexpected situations while the person is doing the path by himself can induce to errors not allowing the person to arrive to the destination. In order to help people to reduce the errors and to propose a learning tool, an app called “Assist Motion” has been created. This work has been done in collaboration between ADAPEI Belfort and Altran Technology. The app was developed in Android operating system with the function to save the steps of the path with specific information and to reuse it to visualize the different steps sequentially as a learning tool. This information associated to the GPS coordinates proposes navigation, emergency and surveillance systems. Tests with specialists and disabled children have been done showing a good acceptance of our first approach.