Design Your Life: User-Initiated Design of Technology to Support Independent Living of Young Autistic Adults

This paper describes the development of and first experiences with 'Design Your Life': a novel method aimed at user-initiated design of technologies supporting young autistic adults in independent living. A conceptual, phenomenological background resulting in four core principles is described. Taking a practice-oriented Research-through-Design approach, three co-design case studies were conducted, in which promising methods from the co-design literature with the lived experiences and practical contexts of autistic young adults and their caregivers is contrasted. This explorative inquiry provided some first insights into several design directions of the Design Your Life-process. In a series of new case studies that shall follow, the Design Your Life-method will be iteratively developed, refined and ultimately validated in practice

Design Your Life

In veel zorgorganisaties is het beleid gericht op empowerment. Professionals begeleiden cliënten in het organiseren van een ondersteunend sociaal netwerk en het ontwikkelen van een persoonsgedreven toekomstplanning. De sociaal werker zal daarbij in de nabije toekomst ook steeds meer te maken krijgen met ondersteunende technologie die deze zelfregie en zelfredzaamheid kunnen vergroten

Sleep problems and daytime functioning in adolescents with ASD

Sleep problems commonly occur in adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis (ASD). However, the knowledge of how sleep problems affect those adolescents’ lives is fragmentised. This review focuses on the question: What is the relationship between sleep and daytime functioning in adolescents with ASD. An electronic database (PsycINFO, Cochrane, ERIC, PubMed, WOS) and hand search (INSAR congress archive and included studies reference lists) was performed in September 2020 resulting in 2561 studies. Studies were included if they contained autistic participants aged between 10 and 19 without intellectual disability, related sleep to daytime functioning, were available in English, and used original data. Nine studies were included (Nparticipants = 674). The most prominent finding was the association of all sleep parameters with internalizing problems. Furthermore, most significant associations with daytime functioning were found for sleep problems in general and for sleep efficiency. The results provide input for tailored sleep interventions. However, more research is needed to get a clearer picture of the relationship between specific sleep parameters and daytime functioning to ensure that this knowledge will provide better input for sleep interventions. It is important to focus on limited age ranges, larger samples sizes, multiple measurement methods, and longitudinal approaches

Using the CeHReS roadmap to develop a sleep intervention for autistic students

Teachers at schools for special education observe that their autistic students experience sleep problems that negatively impact their daytime functioning. Although schools are willing to support their students in reducing sleep problems, the implementation of sleep interventions in schools seem to have been unsuccessful. We co-created a school-based sleep intervention. In this paper, we describe which lessons were learned from the school-partnered development of a school-based sleep intervention for autistic students. We will focus on the first three phases of the Centre for eHealth & Wellbeing Research (CeHReS) roadmap: contextual inquiry, value specification, and design. Each phase had specific goals and activities that led to iterative development with the active involvement of relevant stakeholders (future users and professionals). These stakeholders indicated that four factors, with corresponding operationalizations, were important to include in the sleep intervention: limited burden, sense of usefulness, clear guidance and structure, and support cues. The iterative approach with an emphasis on stakeholder participation enabled us to notice possible barriers to the application of the intervention during its development. We could then identify those barriers and apply lessons to adapt the sleep intervention during development, which will likely increase the successful implementation in schools