Sproutable - In Person

in-person

Inspiration

Many people are benefitting from the advancements in technology, from AI assisted healthcare to AI powered education. However, many people are getting left behind, and the prompt of reimagining user interfaces really inspired us to take accessibility options one step further. For people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), seemingly simple things from greeting people and being responsive can be overstimulating in ways that other people may not understand. During COVID-19, technology was heavily relied on to provide for everyone's needs, yet many children with ASD were shown to have increases in stimming, anxiety, self-injury, impulsiveness, and even violence. To combat this issue, we decided to design Sproutable, an app focused on transforming AR into a private and social space where children with or without ASD can benefit from social stories, real-life scenarios, and stimulating prompts to facilitate social wellbeing and more social integration focused on the idea that everyone should be able to have access to grow to their highest potential.

What it does

As an app that is targeted towards making a safe space for children with ASD, this app will be targeted towards both parents and children, in which both parties can benefit from learning resources, applicable scenarios, and stimulants, all of which are customizable because ASD is such a broad categorization and each individual perceives the world differently. With the help of haptic, visual, and auditory stimulants, children can learn to apply themselves in different social situations, effectively communicate their feelings and needs, and spread awareness. This AR approach to social stories differs from regular social story telling or therapeutic methods, it uses AI algorithmns and personalized customizations to walk a child through a scenario at their own desired pace. It can be monitored by parents or legal guardians and uses accessibility friendly colors and haptics to enforce positive encouragement. Children can even create their own scenarios or choose from generated prompts to build their own story, creating an endless possibility for learning.

How we built it

With Figma, we first brainstormed and affinity mapped, narrowing down our ideas to three underserved communities. We decided to focus on the younger generation, especially since ASD has been observed to be increasing and people, even adults, often find it difficult to express or regulate their emotions in high pressure situations. By educating our young, we can build a better, healthier, and more connected future while accepting the growing role of AI in our society.

Challenges we ran into

Tackling ASD was difficult; it is a highly stigmatized subject and not many people are educated on how to approach these individuals in a respectful manner and can often interpret their unresponsiveness in a negative way. Additionally, every individual is unique in their preferences and level of social awareness, and many children that our team has worked with require rigorous prompting. Trying to prototypes haptics and represent AR and new user interfaces was also a challenge that we had to tackle along with ensuring accessibility for everyone, for instance avoiding the colors red, dark earthy tones, or colors too similar in saturation in our color palette because it would be too overstimulating and unusable for both people with ASD and the colorblind population.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

teamwork! This topic was very uncomfortable for us. All of us have limited experiences in Designathons and we had never encountered this prompt before. It was challenging to understand what the prompt was even about, and even harder to define a problem statement and a target population.

What we learned

Other than familiarizing ourselves with AR, Figma, and 3d modeling platforms to represent our ideas of reimagining the user interface was a fulfilling process. Since it was challenging to conduct research on children over the short amount of time we were given and even more challenging to reach our target population. Even so, we were able to learn about the appropriate ways to approach children with ASD and a little bit of the world. We also learned how to utilize and design for things beyond our scope of practice including animation, AR, haptics, and so much more.

What's next for Sproutable

We hope to incorporate a more community and social aspect through a friends option where multiple people can experience a social story at once and discuss and interact as a group to answer the prompts. Additionally, the adding of friends can help expand the perspectives of children by seeing what their friends have been doing and applying it into real life. We would also like to focus more on the personalization aspect, ASD often results in children with different levels of responsiveness, social awareness, and need for social integration, so creating a more generalized system of preferences that could apply to a lot of people is one of our next goals.

Built With

• figma