RoutineAid: Externalizing Key Design Elements to Support Daily Routines of Individuals with Autism

Title of the Paper

RoutineAid: Externalizing Key Design Elements to Support Daily Routines of Individuals with Autism

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Mobile application design for supporting routine management in individuals with autism
• Keywords: Autism, daily routine management, mobile games, user research, gamified design, accessibility tools, self-management, visual storytelling, user experience, clinical data application

Research Background and Problem Statement

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the daily routines of many individuals with autism, leading to anxiety, impulsive aggression, and other behavioral issues.
  • Routine management techniques for individuals with autism remain underutilized, and there is a lack of tools catering to their need for "self-management."
  • Existing routine management applications are either overly simplistic or too complex, failing to effectively support individuals with autism in systematically exploring and maintaining their daily routines.

• Significance of the Research:

  • Routine management is crucial for everyone’s health, emotional well-being, and social welfare, particularly for individuals with autism.
  • Providing technology-based routine management support can help mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic or other environmental changes.

• Motivation and Related Work:

  • The research aims to fill the gap in existing routine management tools and develop a technological intervention to help individuals with autism establish and maintain daily routines.
  • It draws on previous studies about mobile support for the physical and mental health of individuals with autism to establish design benchmarks for the current application.

Solution

• Method or Solution:

  • Developed an innovative mobile application, RoutineAid, which uses gamified design to help individuals with autism manage four key routine components: physical activity, diet, mindfulness meditation, and sleep.
  • RoutineAid breaks daily routines into actionable micro-tasks and encourages users to complete them through celebratory interactions and visual rewards.
  • Offers customization features, allowing users to add personalized tasks to address individual needs.

• Innovative Features:

  • Integrates preferences of individuals with autism for visual storytelling and gamified interactions, using animated characters and village upgrades to motivate routine management.
  • Provides detailed, quantifiable task guidance to alleviate confusion caused by insufficient task structuring.
  • Includes user journals and leaderboard features to publicly showcase routine management progress, enhancing users’ reflective abilities and engagement.

• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:

  • Gathered design requirements through interviews to understand the needs of individuals with autism and relevant stakeholders.
  • Developed the application with four villages (corresponding to routine components), each containing key routine tasks and sub-tasks.
  • Provided users with task calendars, routine journals, visualized task statuses, and leaderboards to enhance application interactivity and transparency in task completion.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Results:

  • RoutineAid helps individuals with autism break down daily routines into micro-planned tasks, engage in deep reflection, and manage their daily activities.
  • A two-month field study demonstrated that users significantly improved their self-management of daily routines through the application, with high levels of engagement.

• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:

  • Offers comprehensive support for multiple routine types, whereas existing applications typically target a single goal.
  • Uses visual storytelling and gamified design to enhance user immersion and autonomous engagement.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Users submitted an average of 13.01 task reports per day, completing a total of 781 tasks.
  • Users actively utilized the custom task feature (setting an average of 3.7 tasks) to address predefined tasks that were difficult to complete.
  • The competitive incentive mechanism of the leaderboard significantly increased engagement and inspired users to explore others’ routine management strategies.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • The sample size was limited, and the study primarily focused on individuals with mild to moderate autism. Future research should expand to a broader and more gender-balanced sample.
  • Long-term impacts and application sustainability remain to be validated. Future studies could extend to long-term trials to assess the overall health benefits of routine recovery.

Design Recommendations

• Provide task designs that adapt to users’ progress and preferences.
• Balance the autonomous behavior of individuals with autism with periodic expert interventions to support long-term routine management.
• Use visual elements to trigger more user interaction and engagement.
• Go beyond a single leaderboard feature to offer progress-sharing and strategy-exchange opportunities for users.
• Consider employing visual support with loss-aversion strategies to enhance users’ positive responses to task resumption and routine maintenance.
• Ensure robust privacy protection mechanisms to safeguard data security and transparency in clinical applications.