MyCalendar: supporting families to communicate with their child on the autism spectrum

This paper presents a study in which a mobile application, 'MyCalendar', was trialled with children on the autism spectrum and their families. In previous work, we described how the MyCalendar app supported communication across both home and school settings through photos and videos of the child's activities, presented in the format of a visual calendar. These visuals supported the child to communicate and socialise and to recall activities and helped adults to better understand the child holistically. This note augments previous work on MyCalendar by focusing on interactions at home within the family. Findings revealed that routine review of activities documented in MyCalendar enabled children to participate more in family conversations, extended their time spent interacting socially, and reinforced social relationships. This gave the children on the autism spectrum greater opportunity to share and communicate within the family as well as to share their interactions at school with family members.