Using usability, mobility and playability heuristics to evaluate mobile applications for children
Problem Statement
1 in 12 U.S. Children (age 3-17) may have communication-related disorders.
71,000 U.S. SLPs are employed in educational settings and 60% of them use iPads during therapy sessions.
Children use mobile devices on a daily basis, leading to public concerns about screen time.
Children use mobile devices on a daily basis, leading to public concerns about screen time.
Research Goals
In recent years, mobile devices have become a dominant information and communication technology in modern families. Children today interact with mobile devices on a daily basis, raising critical discussions about the impact of technology and their development of speech, language, and social communication skills. Through multiple projects analyzing both commercialized products and research projects, we analyze commercialized apps for speech therapy and develop guidelines to help both design and clinical practitioners to create and evaluate existing mobile technology to help children with communication impairments.
Stakeholder Interviews
Through interviewing speech language pathologists (SLPs) and mobile app designers and developers, this study aims to analyze how iOS-based mobile apps are being designed and implemented for speech therapy.
Leveraging our partnership with “FeedCheck”, we extracted reviews from various popular iOS apps used by SLPs, and generate design and clinical implications for creating and evaluating different genres of apps.
Using app content analysis with most popular apps by speech therapy app developers vs. game app developers, we use a series of mobile game heuristics to analyze how mobile games have been used in the context of speech therapy.
We are a team of undergraduate and graduate students in Informatics and Public Health
at the University of California, Irvine. We analyze commercialized apps for speech therapy
and develop guidelines to help both design and clinical practitioners using mobile technology
to help children with communication impairments.
