App4Autism - Timer, Visual Planning, Token Economy

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App4Autism was born from the need to have a useful visual tool which has a compact format and is always available to manage the behaviour of children and teenagers with autism. It is an effective help for all children with autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder as well as for their families and teachers. App4Autism now has three languages: Italian, Vietnamese and English.

Within App4Autism you can access three tools: Timer, Visual Planning (Agenda) and Token Economy. The in-app manual helps parents and teachers know how to use the tools efficiently. You can take images and audios to work with your child from your device storage to suit the child's interest and characters.

Timer makes the passage of time visible by exploiting a strength that characterizes people with autism, namely visuo-spatial ability. This visual timer also eases the teaching as each activity is characterized by a moment of beginning and one of ending and makes it easier to move from one activity to another.

This timer tool has been designed to provide users with flexibility in customizing and editing to adapt their various purposes. In fact, you can insert photos taken at current moment through the device camera or select them (for example, photos of objects/rooms/people/elements significant to the child) from your device. Importantly, Timer permits you to insert pleasant and interesting audios from your device to display at congratulation phase.

Furthermore, the innovation of the timer is the possibility of showing a predictable and concrete limit of the time remaining to carry out an activity (the image of the current activity disappears gradually, respecting its flow of time), or to make it predictable and concrete on how much time needed to wait before enjoying an appreciative activity (the image of the appreciative activity gradually appears respecting the flow of time). Finally, the child will enjoy the appreciative activity with the audio and pleasant animation.

Visual Planning is a concrete and visual agenda of the sequence of activities which will take place over time to increase the predictability and reduce the uncertainty. It is possible to define a sequence of activities during a limited period of the day, for example during the session of speech therapy (namely Activity Planning), during the day (Daily Activity), during the week (Weekly Planning), or to remark important events in the month (Monthly Planning). The Visual Planning is a customizable and easy-to-use tool, allow users to edit any element very quickly, clearly and structurally.

For Activity Planning, you have opportunities to build it together with the child by selecting the number of activities, then selecting images of the activities from which he/she can choose. Two visual signals (color and symbol) indicates whose turn to choose the activity (child or you).

Weekly Planning allows you to graphically represent the succession of days of the week with the support of customizable color codes. This allows you to unify the color codes with different contexts (school, park, therapy, etc.).

Monthly Planning using calendar supports the graphical representation of the passage of time through the possibility to cross the passing day off to help the child manage the wait for the occurrence of a desired event.

Token Economy is a flexible and effective behavioural program to motivate children to perform a skill independently and to increase the frequency of appropriate behaviour. The tool allows you to clearly define the final award through a photo taken by camera or from your device. Choose the type of "Token" more captivating to the child among some designs already available in the app. Token Economy provides you ability to download “token” images you want from Internet. You also can choose how many "tokens" necessary to reach the award.