About The App
So, here’s a bit about the iPad App we’ve designed. There is a free download version available on iTunes from 11th January 2012 – you can download it here or if that doesn’t work, just search for FindMe Autism. You can see a demo film of FindMe on YouTube and more information at this website.
Copyright Yuan Kai, 2011
Hopefully you’ve already read the background on our homepage. The app has been designed by a combination of researchers at the University of Edinburgh, incorporating input from various people with relevant knowledge, like parents and teachers of children with autism. The app aims to provide a forum for practicing basic social skills in a fun and motivating way. We hope that by practising these skills, children’s real-world social behaviours will also improve.
The Versions
There are a few different versions of the App. The first is the free iTunes downloadable app, called FindMe. This is a ‘lite’ version of the app designed to let people discover whether they think it would be useful for their child, and also released in advance of our clinical trial (Stage Two) so we can get some feedback from users and make any improvements they recommend. If you have already downloaded and used this app, please consider taking five minutes to complete our online survey.
From January 2012 onwards, two enhanced versions of FindMe are being developed in parallel by the same team at the University of Edinburgh and Interface 3. One is for our clinical trial, for which we’re starting
Copyright Yuan Kai, 2011
recruitment in February 2012. The other one is a version of FindMe for commercial release on the App Store later in 2012. There will be a few differences between the trial and commercial versions of the app. First of all, the trial version is going to be used by children in the Edinburgh and Lothians area. Therefore the pre-recorded voices in the app all have Scottish or English accents. The commercial version is meant for an international audience, and so it has pre-recorded voices in both UK and US English accents, French and German, and there are plans to add other languages. The trial version also has a different settings menu, which will allow the researchers to lock various settings so they can’t be changed by the people participating in the research. In the commercial version, the player can change all the settings whenever they want. It is also possible that Interface 3 will add extra content to the commercial version – a wider range of background settings, graphics and animations. This is a superficial difference and just reflects the fact that they have more resources at their disposal than we do at the University. I think it is fair to say that in all relevant dimensions, the two apps will be the same.
In January 2011 we had some press coverage about our project so take a look / listen:
BBC world service interview: SueFletcherWatson interviewed by Tom Hagler