When it comes to children on the autism spectrum, early intervention can be key in establishing crucial life skills and communication abilities, which, in many cases, will ultimately lead to a better quality of life through adolescence and into adulthood. For many parents, technology has proven to be an asset to these efforts. Specifically, there now exist many great mobile apps tailored to benefit children with autism.
Here are several of the best apps aimed at autism therapy and development.
The Sensory Baby Toddler Learning app was not specifically designed for children with autism, but its many therapeutic offerings have been identified as a great resource for young users on the spectrum. Complete with a variety of customizable backgrounds, themes, and effects, the app simulates a soothing underwater environment. Users control a fish, using their fingers to create bubbles and fireworks.
Emotional development is typically a critical component of autism development, and Touch and Learn Emotions strives to make the process easier; it is aimed at “kids who are struggling to relate to and empathize with other kids, or who find it difficult to express their emotions using words,” and it achieves this goal by using interactive pictures and audio clips in tandem to identify common emotional states, including fear, happiness, sadness, and hunger.
By employing a series of gentle literary exercises, Autism Read and Write aims to strengthen writing and reading skills — a consistent challenge within autistic development — at an accessible level. The app is specifically aimed at school-level children on the spectrum. Parents are able to customize exercise difficulty to facilitate gradual development while keeping things comfortably challenging.
Autism Parenting Magazine has been a longstanding resource for parents of autistic children, and the publication’s app is no different; it provides a helpful mix of expert advice, development exercises, therapy ideas, and perhaps most valuably a variety of firsthand accounts from other parents of children on the spectrum. This app is a must have for anyone looking to broaden both their knowledge of autism and their sense of community.
The designers of iPrompts based their app on years of peer-reviewed scientific research, and as a result the app has been used by thousands of care providers and educators worldwide. The app contains “of visual support tools designed to improve attention to task, increase understanding of upcoming events, smooth transitions to new environments, and empower visual thinkers to stay organized and communicate preferences.”