Wearable Life: A Wrist-Worn Application to Assist Students in Special Education

Wrist-worn wearables hold promising potential in educational settings, specially as assistive technologies for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The possibility to integrate multiple sensors and actuators, summed with the close contact with end users, continuous and unobtrusive usage, accessible placement and conventional look enable wrist-worn applications to accommodate requirements from diverse domains. In special education, wrist-worn wearables have potential to support students in their everyday learning activities. The concrete opportunities in this domain are still unclear though. To explore the potential of wrist-worn applications in special education, we employ user-centered design techniques to elicit the application needs and system requirements. Then, we formally specified, developed and tested an assistive application. The Wearable Life app is a cross-platform solution that integrates a mobile and a wearable device to assist students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and as such enhance their educational experience.