Designing Personal Informatics for Self-reflection and Self-awareness: The Case of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

A main challenge in designing for children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is to support the learning process of supressing undesired behaviour on daily routines by means of positive feedback and rewards. Personal Informatics (PI) is a model that supports capturing and integration of personal data to facilitate reflection and action that is used as a design platform to support behavioral learning. This paper presents a design-driven research study that illustrates the potential of PI to support self-awareness and self-reflection of ADHD children. Two design approaches are described which aim to support self-behavioral inhibition learning: (a) KITA, a Kinesiofeedback Toy for ADHD, being a Tangible User Interface that measures and assesses children’s activity and provides them with feedback as to whether or not behavior is within appropriate limits; and (b) WRISTWIT, a Wearable device presenting information on attention and time for ADHD to increase on-task behavior. KITA and WRISTWIT were tested in the field with children as design means to implement PI to positively modify children behavior during daily school routines.