Designing an App to Empower Adults with Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities Against Abuse

What is it about?

In the US, the abuse of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) is at epidemic proportions; however, the reporting of such abuse has been severely lacking. It has been found that individuals with I/DD are more aware of when and how to report abuse when they have received abuse-prevention training. Consequently, in this paper we present the design and prototyping of a mobile-computing app called Recognize that empowers adults with I/DD to independently learn about abuse. To this end, we first conducted an auto-ethnographic co-design of Recognize with individuals and self-advocates from the I/DD community. Next, based on the outcomes from the co-design process, we developed three (3) initial prototype variants of Recognize and performed a preliminary user study with six individuals with I/DD who have experience teaching others with I/DD about abuse. Based on the findings of this preliminary user study we created a consolidated prototype of Recognize and performed a more detailed qualitative user study with 11 individuals with I/DD who represented the eventual users of Recognize. The participants in this user study found it to be viable for use by individuals with I/DD. We end the paper with a discussion of the implications of our findings toward the development of a deployable version of Recognize and similar apps.

Featured Image

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Adults with Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities (I/DD) are abused far too often and a lot of the abuse goes unreported. Teaching adults with I/DD about abuse and how to report it empowers them against the abuse.