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The Missing Data of the App Phenomena
Over the last three there has been widespread adoption of tablet computers. This has been especially true among the autism community with respect to the iPad. The intuitive, touch interface of these devices has made them accessible to children, and allowed children diagnosed with autism to use computational devices in new and exciting ways. Apps that target child education are among the top downloaded apps, and there are numerous autism related websites with extensive list of “apps for autism.” Because of the widespread use of tablets with children diagnosed with autism there is a new potential for collecting data at large scale related to usage and learning objectives. Despite this, we have little understanding of their actual usage, benefit, or greater potential for the autism community.
Objectives:
There are many autism related websites that provide lists of apps intended for use by children diagnosed with autism. Of these Apps, very few are intended as “autism” apps and are instead simply apps for children. The vast majority of these apps have informal educational purpose. We wished to better understand what kinds of apps were being suggested and used by the autism community. Furthermore, we wanted to know if the apps were providing data collection of any kind, which may be used for subsequent analysis of usage and or learning.
Methods:
We conducted searches of the internet including personal blogs, educational resource websites, and autism related websites such as Autism Speaks to compile a list of over 400 apps. Each app was reviewed and categorized. In addition, we attempted to determine if individual apps collected usage data and if so if any type of post-analytics was performed.
Results:
The apps were categorized into 10 groupings: communication, language, math, scheduling, daily skills, social and emotional learning, motor skills, self soothing, behavior tracking, and entertainment. Communication and language learning apps accounted for 21% and 24% of all apps. Overall, some 27% of apps collected some type of data at the local device level. Only 9% of apps provided services that stored the data on a remote server for sharing or further analytics.
Conclusions:
In a large review of applications from many sources we found that apps promoted for the autism community fall into 10 general categories. Furthermore, we found that communication and language learning apps account for 45% of all app types. With respect to understanding usage and learning giving the apps there must first be apps that collect data. We found that only 27% of apps collect any type of usage data, while even fewer provided back useful analytics. Furthermore, only 9% of apps collect data on a remote server for sharing or further analytics. Because of the mass adoption of tablet computers by the autism community, there is an opportunity to learn about behavior and learning through the usage of apps. We have the potential to leverage scale to be understand how those diagnosed with autism use technology, but we cannot do this unless we are collecting data and performing analysis.