Software Improvements during Pilot Test

During the entire project, including the user test, the software was tested and improved to better adhere to the tutors’ needs and make the teaching methodology that implements ABA principles on electronic devices more usable.

Several adjustments and new functions were implemented during the pilot test. First, we realized that mastery of an article (the goal of the ABA programs) is not a definitive process. Sometimes it happens that a child appears to be unfamiliar with

an article previously considered mastered, so the work on this article must be repeated. For that reason, we added the status ‘suspended’ to the previous defined “acquisition” and “mastered”. Furthermore, we modified the flow among the status: a mastered article can return to acquisition status when required. Similarly, if an article appears to cause behavioral problems or seems to be very difficult for the child, tutors could decide to diversify the work, temporarily bypassing the obstacle. The implemented solution is to allow the tutor to put an article in the “suspended” status permitting a later re-approach (Fig. 3.10 in Chapter 3). In addition, the tutor can decide a priori to exclude one or more articles if he/she considers them not suitable for a specific child, putting them in the ‘excluded’ status (Fig. 3.10 in Chapter 3).

Another tutor’s request concerned the possibility of adding comments as a final step during a session. Writing comments in the software (or manually) requires time and attention, not always available when working with ASD children because for instance, the child may initiate self-stimulation or other problem behavior requiring the tutor’s attention. Therefore, we implemented the possibility of inserting/updating this data after the session, protecting the integrity and consistency of global data.

The software favors easy configuration of the most suitable child UI because it proposes the single trial of different levels/programs according to adaptability rules. For instance, a different canvas for the child’s screen is proposed according to the child’s characteristics, since the command can be presented or not depending on whether the child is non-receptive or receptive. However, especially in the case of the program “Receptive word”, an image of the target article appears near the stimulus (Fig. 4.13). Some children need this kind of discriminative stimulus as a little prompt so the tutor can control its appearance or disappearance by pressing a key.

Fig. 4.13 Example of software customization: different UI for Receptive program

Another phenomenon observed during the pilot test was that children often show some problems in fine motility when dragging an element on the touchscreen display. Specifically, if they started with a basic level of the exercise that requires dragging an element in a unique trajectory (from center bottom to center top) they were often unable to experiment the other trajectories required in the following levels. To tackle that problem, from the first level of difficulty the software now assigns random screen positions to the target element so children are forced to experiment and train different wrist movements. Concerning personalization of software, a new level of customization introduced was the possibility of loading personal items in the Places (of the house, school and other familiar places) and

Family categories that obviously contain different images for each child. In this

them with his/her child thanks to a user interface designed for this purpose. The association with the child user profile will make this content invisible to the other users.

Summarizing, the main characteristics of the ABCD SW customizations depending on a child’s abilities are as follows.

Customizable features:

- Personalization of multimedia reinforcements (child configuration file) - Personalization of the categories Relatives and Places (UI for items

upload)

- Exclusion or suspension of problematic items (drag & drop in the tutor UI) - Fading of the visual support for the trial ('D' Key)

- Reset of a trial if inadequate for the child ('R' key)

- Child age < 5 years: Matching programs only with words are removed from the tutor UI (child configuration file)

- If the child is Non-Receptive, the command is shown as a word in the trials (child configuration file)

- If the child is Non-Expressive, and thus cannot answer vocally, the UI shows three words from among which the child will choose the right one (child configuration file).

Regarding the general features of the software, the recovery session mechanism has been introduced to resolve the problem of an unintentionally interrupted session. ABCD SW works using the concept of PHP sessions, it means that each time a user accesses the application there is a time interval after which, if the user is inactive, the session is interrupted. Generally, a traditional ABA session must be carried out without interruption except in cases of occurrence of a problem behavior that forces the tutor to diversify the intervention trying to extinguish that incorrect behavior. In that case, the event occurred can be recorded in the database and the session completed. Nevertheless, the test phase with real users revealed that some users sometimes opened a session suspending it for hours even without having problem behavior ongoing, or it happened that the web browser crashed. These events could cause different problems in the correct closure of sessions. To face those anomalies, the software has been improved introducing the possibility to recover a session. Specifically, looking for the ID of each session and introducing another field for tracking the status of sessions, when a tutor accesses the software a query controls if incorrectly closed sessions are present in the database, and if necessary offers the user the opportunity to complete (conclude) or to continue the interrupted session (see Fig. 4.14).