Fine motor skills are important for children to participate in their occupations, including self-care, productivity and leisure. The deficits of fine motor skills are common in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and as a result, they experience difficulties performing daily tasks. Digital devices, such as touch screen devices, has been found to support children with disabilities learn and develop their life skills (Alaniz et al., 2015; Dehghan et al., 2017; Seo, 2018). However, a lack of training on how to use applications and insufficient settings have discouraged occupational therapy practitioners (OTPs) to continue using applications on a touch screen device, regardless of the effectiveness (King et al., 2017; ). In this project, an application, Finger Up, has been developed based on theoretical frameworks, evidence-based literature, and an online survey completed by OTPs.
Results from the online survey revealed that the limitations of the existing applications include 1) a lack of visual display for monitoring progress, 2) a lack of visual rewards, 3) a lack of sound rewards, 4) a lack of visual effect for wrong answers, 5) a lack of sound effect for wrong answers, 6) busy background and sensitivity settings, and 7) not colorful. The features suggested from the survey results are 1) simple to use, 2) simple layout, 3) a timer, 4) sounding effect for wrong answers, 5) visual rewards, 6) visual effect, 7) simple instruction, and 8) setting a time limit for each game. OTPs will receive three training sessions prior to the implementation of Finger Up with their clients. Once the training sessions are complete, OTPs will use Finger Up with their clients, 5–11-year-old children with ASD, in a 30-minute therapy session, 5 days a week, for 3 months. A pre- and post-assessment will be conducted for comparison to investigate the effectiveness of Finger Up. Long-term impacts of the program seek to improve the fine motor skills of children with ASD using Finger Up with the suggested protocol and promote technology use in occupational therapy. / 2024-05-11T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44420 |
| Date | 11 May 2022 |
| Creators | Kan, Hoi Ki |
| Contributors | Abbott Gaffney, Cynthia |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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