AutApp - Autism App

About

AutApp is the capstone project for my graduation in Computer Engineering: It is a mobile app for people with autism, built around two things: helping identify and express how they are feeling, and offering guided play.

The main idea behind this project came about after I tried to create something that would help others, and I realized that apps for psychological support and therapy were too expensive for most people and there were few options on the market, mainly when focusing on autism. That’s when the opportunity arose to use my programming skills, in partnership with psychologists, to create something that would provide value while also being affordable.

Designing for one specific user

After reviewing the concepts, studying autism and gathering feedback from the local AMA (a local school focused on autism) along with the partnership with psychologists, the scope of the project became the following:

The first area was emotion feelings and how to recognize them. One of the main characteristics of people with a strong autism is social issues, mainly because people expect them to react in a way, while it may not be easy to identify feelings or details in others' faces or body patterns, which leads to social relationship issues. The second area was focused on motor coordination, which is another area that needs attention and most of the paid (and expensive) apps I researched were providing.

Development

The biggest challenge here was the psychology part of the project: Each UI and experience should be validated, tested and confirmed by professionals and bibliography, supported by scientific studies. The font size, the movements, the colors, the feedback after a wrong or good movement: Everything needs to be calibrated to achieve the results expected. Thanks to the entire team of psychologists that helped me and the AMA institution, I had the support to study, develop and test with tablets/mobile personally in the field.

At that time (2017), this project already used AI in some way: To recognize the feelings, I used the Google APIs, integrating with the camera. The goal was simple: Showing a character to the user, which could have different feelings: sad, happy, big smile, confused, etc. Then, the user should take a picture of themselves showing the same feeling as the character and submit, then the Google AI could review the photo and ensure the feeling was correct or not.

The second "game" was moving items with different shapes to its correspondent. For example: There's a cat and a pen on the screen, then some shadows/slots available in the same shape where the user should drag and drop the items to them. This needed some calibration to avoid any frustration in scenarios like the user dropping the image slightly outside the slot: It should still consider this as a success.

The good surprise

After showing this project at the college, I remember receiving a lot of compliments from the teachers and directors. After publishing this online and sharing with people in the area that I know but also in Facebook groups, it grew very fast, getting a lot of feedback from families using it with their children or relatives, as well as being downloaded more than 30,000 times across 15 countries and being referenced in 3 other academic projects. Never a project in the college has reached this impact before.

Conclusion

This app showed me how technology can impact and help people. Sometimes we focus so much on utility apps that are more towards money, time optimization, automation, etc., but there're several people out there that would benefit from our help with apps or projects that can significantly improve their lives in a very special way.

Unfortunately, I left this app online for a few years and then removed it from the store, since I couldn't maintain it at that time due to other work, I don't have many images to share. Although I received contact to continue the project, it always led to people trying to sell it in some way, which was not the goal with the project.