'Wow! You're Wearing a Fitbit, You're a Young Boy Now!": Socio-Technical Aspirations for Children with Autism in India

Abstract

In this paper, we build a case for incorporating socio-technical aspirations of different stakeholders, e.g. parents, care-givers, and therapists, to motivate technology acceptance and adoption for children with autism. We base this on findings from two studies at a special school in New Delhi. First, with six children with autism, their parents and therapists we explored whether fitness bands motivate children with autism in India to increase their physical activity. Second, with five parents and specialists at the same school, we conducted interviews to understand their expectations from and current usage of technology. Previous work defines a culture-based framework for assistive technology design with three dimensions: lifestyle, socio-technical infrastructure, and monetary and informational resources. To this framework we propose a fourth dimension of socio-technical aspirations. We discuss the implications of the proposed fourth dimension to the existing framework.