Mobile technology-based visual schedule in interventions for children with autism

Children with autism experience abnormal development. As a condition with developmental disorder, they were deficits in a few different cognitive skills. One of them is executive dysfunction, an area that affects a lot on their organisational skill. Due to this abnormality, these children tend to rely on adults to carry out even basic daily tasks. Thus, visual schedule module has been developed from time to time to reduce the children’s reliance to adults. Known as visual thinkers, the use of images in schedules has been found effective on children with autism. However, conventional activity schedule consumes time and efforts to be prepared despite needing storage for the large quantity of image analogues. Nonetheless, research has shown that computer instructions have positive effects in educating the children with autism. Therefore, a mobile technology-based visual schedule seems to be a good way to ease the use of visual activity schedule. This research aims to investigate the potential of embedded visual schedule into mobile application towards children with autism users in Malaysia and the possibilities of it being used in educational environments. This research will be significant in the process of designing appropriate instructional multimedia-based tools to assist the intervention of children with autism. To the best knowledge of the researcher, this research is an exploratory study and it will not be compared to other universities. While executing this research, observations were first made to local public schools integrated with special education programs and autism centres that intervene children with autism. Some educational practitioners were interviewed for an in-depth understanding regarding the autism’s conditions as well as current practice in education for autism. Then, a total of twenty samples diagnosed with autism participated in the field experiment in order to observe their engagements in completing a task using instructions given from a visual schedule application. Results from the study showed that children with autism interact well with the application and some improvement guidelines were suggested for the development of such programs. Some gaps were detected regarding the designs and discussions were made with the teachers on the design improvements.