Building and Testing a Developmental Milestone Tracking App with Parents and Childcare Providers

Background:  The earlier autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is detected, the earlier children can receive intervention services, resulting in improved social, cognitive, and adaptive skills. Birth to 5 years is an especially critical time for identifying potential signs of delayed or unusual development that may indicate ASD. Tracking children’s development can lead to an earlier diagnosis.

Program background: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides developmental monitoring tools for through its “Learn the Signs. Act Early.” program. Increasing accessibility of mobile technology raises the important opportunity for using this technology to help parents get information about their children’s development. A 2011 study found that mothers’ smartphone adoption has risen 64% since 2009, making them 18% more likely than the U.S. average to own a smartphone. Therefore, the research team developed and evaluated an Android app to make the CDC’s developmental monitoring tools more readily accessible.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Pilot research suggested that parents would benefit from mobile technology for recording their children’s developmental progress. Based on this research, a fully functioning Android app was developed. The app lets parents use a Milestone option to track one child’s or multiple children’s progress, add notes for their next doctor’s visit, and e-mail themselves or their doctor a table with the milestones a child has or has not completed. A Listoption provides parents with a list of milestones for any given age, as well as a set of activities to encourage their children’s development of social, cognitive, and language abilities. An evaluation study was conducted with nine participants, including: two parents of young children, three human-computer interaction (HCI) students, and four childcare providers. The HCI students evaluated the app for issues with the app’s interface layout and functions. Parents and childcare providers rated their anticipated difficulty before performing several short tasks (e.g., answering milestone questions, creating a profile) and then rated the difficulty of the task (actual difficulty) a second time upon completing it. No major operational errors were found by the HCI students, although certain words, labels, and visual aspects of the app interface were adjusted to improve consistency within the app. Parents, the primary users of the system, performed each task in less than one minute. For all tasks, parents’ actual difficulty ratings were lower than the anticipated difficulty, indicating that the tasks were easier to perform than expected. Childcare providers, secondary users who may use the app as a reference guide or to track children’s milestones if a parent gives them permission, found the app similarly easy to use.

Conclusions:  The Android app provides parents and childcare providers with useful information about developmental milestones and has the potential to help them track children’s developmental progress during early childhood.

Implications for research and/or practice: Research teams should test mobile technology with various user groups to get diverse feedback. Collaboration with HCI professionals can lead to valuable insights to maximize adoption of the technology.