Date Presented 03/26/20
The study’s findings highlight common themes that emerged from pediatric OTs’ experiences using mobile apps for promoting children’s developmental skills. The findings are important to the science of mobile technology development and aid in understanding the ways in which mobile technology can be designed and used to support OTs to better enhance children’s development.
Primary Author and Speaker: Supawadee Lee
Contributing Authors: Zhan Zhang
PURPOSE: In this study, the researchers focused on understanding the ways in which mobile technology can be used and designed to support occupational therapists to better promote children’s visual perceptual skills and manage their practices. The research question is “What experiences pediatric occupational therapists have in using commonly available mobile applications in their practice?”
DESIGN: The design used in the study is a phenomenological research design. A purposive sampling method was used to recruit occupational therapists who have worked in a pediatric population and utilized mobile apps in their practice.
METHOD: The research study was approved by an Ethics Board. The participants had signed a consent form prior to an interview session. The researchers conducted interviews with six pediatric occupational therapists to gain holistic understanding about their technology needs, challenges and issues in using and choosing appropriate mobile applications, and aspects that need to be improved. Each interview lasted approximately an hour. The researchers used an open coding technique to analyze the interview data. More specifically, the authors first reviewed the interview transcripts to get an overview of the context. In the subsequent stage, they transferred these data into Nvivo, a program for organizing, storing, and manipulating qualitative data. Each researcher independently coded and the codings were compared for agreements to ensure trustworthiness of the study. The content analysis was focused on technology needs and challenges in using appropriate mobile applications.
RESULTS: Six pediatric occupational therapists practicing across the country participated in the study. The interviews were done via a video-conference in an hour session. The content analysis shows three major themes emerged including benefits of mobile apps use in OT practice, challenges faced in using mobile apps, and features of mobile apps useful in practice.
Theme 1: Benefits of mobile applications in OT practice
The participants found mobile apps were a useful tool in engaging and motivating a child to work on a task.
“I think it keeps them engaged longer. It’s very stimulating for them, I think that they get multiple modalities of sensory input, so they get of course the visual cues, they get the tactile cues if they’re using their finger or using the stylus, they get the auditory feedback.”
Theme 2: Challenges in transferring the skills practiced on a mobile app to real-life
“There’s a lot of programs that rely on finger points, like finger isolation of the index finger, and that drives me insane. It drives me absolutely crazy, because the second digit isolation is not real life. There’s no amount of tracing, drawing. This is not anything for us to transition off the screen and into actual life.”
Theme 3: Design and features of a mobile app useful to have
The common features identified are multiple users, user friendly, and different levels of difficulty in an app.
Difficulty levels
“I think my first instinct is that there has to be a couple of different activities, and potentially a way to grade the activity from being a little bit more simple into a little bit more complex.”
CONCLUSION: The findings highlight common themes emerged from pediatric occupational therapists’ experience in using mobile apps. These themes can be used to assist in designing and developing an appropriate mobile app that meet the needs of occupational therapists in their practice.
IMPACT STATEMENT: The study findings are important to science of mobile technology development and aid in understanding the ways in which mobile technology can be designed and used to support occupational therapists to better promote children’s developmental skills.
References
Beschorner, B. & Hutchison, A. (2013). iPads as a literacy teaching tool in early childhood. Internat. J. Math. Ed. Sci. Tech., 1, 16-24.
Khaddage, F., Müller, W., & Flintoff, K. (2016). Advancing Mobile Learning in Formal And Informal Settings via Mobile App Technology: Where to From Here, and How? Educational Technology & Society, 19 (3), 16–26.
Olson, M.R. (2012). Tech support for the emotional regulation needs of children and adolescents with autism. OT Practice, 17(21), 20-21.
