Knowledge
Apps that help improve social skills of children with autism
A number of apps that help improve social skills of children with autism.
Autism Spectrum disorder (ASD) impacts the nervous system and affects the overall cognitive, emotional, social and physical health of the affected individual. Statistics reveal that 1 in 100 children under the age of 10 suffer from autism in India. Utilising educational applications for children with ASD can be quite helpful for their learning and social development. Being consistent is one of the most important things to note while dealing with a child with autism. Creating consistency in your child’s environment is the best way to reinforce learning. Planning and sticking to the plan is key. There are a number of apps that aid this and help improve social skills of children with autism.
Proloquo2Go – Symbol-based AAC
Proloquo2Go is a full featured augmentative communication application that offers picture only, picture and text, and keyboard options for message formulation. The voices available are a more natural sounding male, female adult or child. The keyboard and picture/text grids can be used for novel sentence building. The images on the buttons are SymbolStix, although the user is able to use real pictures and some pictures are a more life-like cartoon drawing.
Choiceworks
Choiceworks is an app for helping children complete daily routines and tasks, understanding and controlling feelings and to improve their patience. Caregivers, teachers, and therapists use this app with students diagnosed with autism (verbal and nonverbal), ADD, and other learning disabilities to keep them on task and motivated. The Choiceworks app is high quality, user friendly and students enjoy using it.
I Can Have Conversations With You!™
I Can Have Conversations With You! is designed to help children with conversation and social skills. The app provides a unique solution to parents who want to empower their child to initiate, understand, and participate in conversations. An easy-to-follow, self-explanatory programme engages the learner’s interest within a fun, supportive environment so that learning to communicate is naturally reinforcing.
DayCape – Daily visual planning
DayCape is an app that allows therapists, teachers, parents, and even the child themselves to set up visual schedules. This app is an excellent way to help children with a variety of disabilities to manage their day. It is primarily for children in pre-k to class 5. The app allows a user to set up activities for the child using pre-set pictures, or by uploading personalised images. Once the activities are set up, notifications show up on the child’s device to remind them of the activities they have been assigned.
iPrompts
iPrompts, a special educational mobile application that supports organisational skills, sets great expectations for performance, supports, and reminders. In addition, users can create and edit visual activities along with Setting timer with images that will display how much more time is left for the kid to complete an activity.
Learn with Rufus
Being a completely user-friendly app, Learn with Rufus is made to teach emotional words, facial expressions, etc. to kids who are facing difficulties communicating. Also, the application can be utilised to develop language, communication, and social skills.
AutisMate
Blending features of various apps into one, AutisMate is an excellent mobile app for kids where they learn to do their everyday chores. This app lets parents set up dynamic situations such as a kid tapping on the faucet and see how to properly wash hands. Apart from this, there is a visual scheduling feature and sentence formation category. This is available only on iPad and iPhone.
Dreampad
Usually, putting autistic kids to sleep is no less than any challenge. In situations like these, Dreampad app comes quite handy to help parents in the process of putting their kids to sleep. The app utilises a special pillow that plays soothing music along with vibrations. In addition, the app also helps in calming the most hypersensitive kid.