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