Integrating Behavior of Children with Profound Intellectual, Multiple, or Severe Motor Disabilities With Location and Environment Data Sensors for Independent Communication and Mobility: App Development and Pilot Testing

Background: Children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) or severe motor and intellectual disabilities (SMID) only communicate through movements, vocalizations, body postures, muscle tensions, or facial expressions on a pre- or protosymbolic level. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, there are few systems developed to specifically aid in categorizing and interpreting behaviors of children with PIMD or SMID to facilitate independent communication and mobility. Further, environmental data such as weather variables were found to have associations with human affects and behaviors among typically developing children; however, studies involving children with neurological functioning impairments that affect communication or those who have physical and/or motor disabilities are unexpectedly scarce.

Objective: This paper describes the design and development of the ChildSIDE app, which collects and transmits data associated with children's behaviors, and linked location and environment information collected from data sources (GPS, iBeacon device, ALPS Sensor, and OpenWeatherMap application programming interface [API]) to the database. The aims of this study were to measure and compare the server/API performance of the app in detecting and transmitting environment data from the data sources to the database, and to categorize the movements associated with each behavior data as the basis for future development and analyses.

Methods: This study utilized a cross-sectional observational design by performing multiple single-subject face-to-face and video-recorded sessions among purposively sampled child-caregiver dyads (children diagnosed with PIMD/SMID, or severe or profound intellectual disability and their primary caregivers) from September 2019 to February 2020. To measure the server/API performance of the app in detecting and transmitting data from data sources to the database, frequency distribution and percentages of 31 location and environment data parameters were computed and compared. To categorize which body parts or movements were involved in each behavior, the interrater agreement κ statistic was used.

Results: The study comprised 150 sessions involving 20 child-caregiver dyads. The app collected 371 individual behavior data, 327 of which had associated location and environment data from data collection sources. The analyses revealed that ChildSIDE had a server/API performance >93% in detecting and transmitting outdoor location (GPS) and environment data (ALPS sensors, OpenWeatherMap API), whereas the performance with iBeacon data was lower (82.3%). Behaviors were manifested mainly through hand (22.8%) and body movements (27.7%), and vocalizations (21.6%).

Conclusions: The ChildSIDE app is an effective tool in collecting the behavior data of children with PIMD/SMID. The app showed high server/API performance in detecting outdoor location and environment data from sensors and an online API to the database with a performance rate above 93%. The results of the analysis and categorization of behaviors suggest a need for a system that uses motion capture and trajectory analyses for developing machine- or deep-learning algorithms to predict the needs of children with PIMD/SMID in the future.