Overview

Blobwords is a social media app, that could help children with developmental expressive language disorders express themselves through creativity and have a sense of community and belonging. Developmental expressive language disorder is where a child has lower than normal vocabulary, having difficulty saying complex words and remembering words.

Team

2 other participants

My Role

UX/UI Designer
UX Researcher
Designathon Participant

Tools Used

Figma

 

Duration

24 hours

Background

I participated in a two-day long Designathon that requires to design a mobile app that will help those with communication disorders express themselves through a creative digital medium that could further their sense of belonging and community.

Common communication disorders included language disorders, speech disorders, hearing disorder, and central auditory processing disorders. According to the national institute on deafness and other communication disorders, nearly 1 in 12 U.S children ages 3-17 has a disorder related to voice, speech, language or swallowing in the past 12 months.

My team and I decided we will focus on expressive language because if children aren’t able to expressive themselves, adults won’t be able to understand their children and could cause relationship strains. It could possibly reduce depression and anxiety in children if they know they could talk to their parents, if children could just express themselves.

THE PROBLEM

Developmental expressive language can be frustrating to children that aren't able to express and understand words.

THE SOLUTION

A social media app that children, ages 5-8, could express and understand their words, thoughts, and feelings better.

A sense of community

A feed that has the users’ friends shared using their expressive language and the AI would generate a status from analyzing the voice memo, drawing, or text.

Expressing thoughts

When the child wants to create a status, they can pick which avenue they think they want to express their feelings and thoughts with: speak, draw, or write.

AI help

After the user clicks ‘post’, they can come and see which statement AI has generated that felt closest to their actual feeling and tell which ones are correct. Users can also click on words that they don’t know and a dictionary definition will come up.

RESEARCH FINDINGS

In younger children, some symptoms could include:

  • being late to put words together
  • struggling to make new words and make conversation
  • does not fully understand when words are spoken to
 
In developing children and adults, additional symptoms may include:
  • not being able to put their feelings and thoughts into words/sentences
  • rambling
  • using vague words and vocabulary
  • using simple sentences and incorrect words
  • speaking quietly
BRAINSTORM

In order for children to express and understand words, thoughts and feelings better, we had to understand how we currently, as adults and teachers, help improve developmental expressive language symptoms.

To improve, children must be able to:

  1. understand words and their meaning that are spoken to them
  2. organize information  
  3. improve speaking, reading, writing skills
 
DESIGNS
PROTOTYPE
WHAT I LEARNED

I learned that developmental language disorder could be an invisible disorder that a lot of people have and not everyone would know. Throughout the project, I think I have a spectrum of developmental language disorder, being statistically, 1 in 14 children has a developmental language disorder. I sometimes use words incorrectly and use vague words like ‘like’ and ‘stuff’. However, working with others, I don’t feel like I have it as I was able to voice my thoughts and get this project done.

NEXT STEPS

We would find an aged-appropriate child with a developmental language disorder to see if this app would help them communicate their feelings and thoughts with their peers, teachers, and parents better. We could measure the accuracy of the AI coming up with sentences vs how often users type their feelings in their statuses. If a user is able to come up with sentences with their feelings directly, instead of rambling, it would be a success!

IN THE FUTURE

However, if I were to do it again, I would not make it a social app because statistically, only 20% of children ages 6-8 have a smartphone and wouldn’t know what social media is. I would make the app into a personal journal to keep track of the events in their lives and learn AI-generated vocabulary that described their feelings/thoughts. Instead of messages, they would have a dictionary of all the adjectives that they’ve felt before to keep track of their feelings/thoughts and possibly use them again. I would continue to use AI to help users analyze their feelings.

Since developmental language disorders can affect older children and adults, it would be a good app to keep track of all words they could use again in their emails, social media, and/or texts.

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