Playful interactive mirroring to support bonding between parents and children with Down Syndrome

This paper presents the ongoing design research and preliminary results in the field of family-centered healthcare, in particular directed to families with children at the age of 0-2 years with Down Syndrome. A central concern of these families is parent-child bonding, as bonding is often disrupted due to a lack of feedback from infants. We designed for parent-child bonding following a multi-stakeholder inquiry, in our case a family, a developmental and child psychologist, a physiotherapist specialized in child-care, and a family therapist. Based on an inquiry we argue that parentchild bonding can be supported through playful interactive mirroring. We designed a prototype to promote mirroring through multimodal stimuli, such as light and sound. As a first evaluated prototype resulted in enthusiasm and a sense of pride for the parents, we propose further explorations on the notion of playful interactive mirroring and future studies with the designed platform

Technology-enhanced support for children with Down Syndrome: A systematic literature review

This paper presents a systematic literature review on technology-enhanced support for children with Down Syndrome and young people who match the mental age of children considered neurotypical (NT). The main aim is threefold: to (1) explore the field of digital technologies designed to support children with Down Syndrome, (2) identify technology types, contexts of use, profiles of individuals with Down Syndrome, methodological approaches, and the effectiveness of such supports, and (3) draw out opportunities for future research in this specific area. A systematic literature review was conducted on five search engines resulting in a set of 703 articles, which were screened and filtered in a systematic way until they were narrowed to a corpus of 65 articles for further analysis. The synthesis identify several key findings: (1) there is diversity of technology supports available for children with Down Syndrome targeting individual capabilities, (2) overlapping definitions of technology makes it difficult to place technology supports in individual categories rather than subsets of a broader term, (3) the average sample size remained small for participants in the studies, making it difficult to draw solid conclusions on the effectiveness of the related interventions, (4) the distribution of papers indicates that this is an emerging area of research and is starting to build body of knowledge, and (5) there are limited studies on newer emerging technologies which requires further investigation to explore their potential