A Mobile Application and Academic Portal to Support Professionals Working with People Having Severe Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Abstract Some recent works claim that more support is required to include people with severe intellectual or developmental disabilities in their communities. This support can be provided in the form of tools for the professionals that will be in charge of the disabled people, that is, teachers, psychologists, speech therapists, etc. In this communication, we present one ICT tool for this purpose. The tool is composed of a mobile application, where the professionals can see some basic information on different syndromes that affect the communication abilities and have access to a list of basic words with related resources like sign language videos, pictures and pictograms. All the resources included in the mobile application are available in four different languages (Spanish, Catalan, German and Dutch) and are downloaded from a web service (not installed in the mobile application). The separation of mobile application and web service allows us to update and add resources whenever it is needed. The second part of the tool is an academic portal where the administrators can update and upload new resources that will be immediately available in the academic portal and in the mobile applications. These tools have been designed using an agile development methodology, which allows the frequent interaction between the stakeholders and the developers to end with a high quality software product. The design of both the academic portal and the mobile application allows the addition of new languages for the resources.