Friendly Plans

About the App and Autism Therapy

“Friendly Plan” is an application supporting autism therapy for children and adults. It is based on two therapy methods: activity schedules and scripts.

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties with social interaction and communication and by restricted and repetitive behavior. Parents often notice signs of autism during the first three years of their child's life. Although there is no known cure, early therapy can help children with autism develop social and communication skills. Activity schedules are a behavioral method of autism treatment. They help people with autism learn how to perform different tasks or activities on their own and develop social behaviours. Schedules are presented as pictures or texts (lists). Scripts are written or visual prompts that initiate or sustain interaction. They teach an autistic person to start a conversation on his or her own, without verbal hints like “Say: hello”. Both methods were verified by scientists at Princeton Child Development Institute in the USA. More about the treatment and some success stories on PCDI website (EN).

The app allows users to create activity schedules in a digital form and freely modify them. It makes the preparation of schedules, which previously involved a lot of manual work, much faster and easier. “Friendly Plan” supports therapy sessions also by showing schedules in a form adjusted to the development level of the patient (global settings of the text size, use of illustrations etc.).

Old Version

There are two apps in use at the moment: one for the therapist and one for the child. You can see videos from therapy sessions on the website of Institute for Child Development in Gdańsk (PL). You can download the old app from Google Play.

New Version

The new version of “Friendly Plan”, which is currently being developed, will be a single app for two types of users.

We have planned three touchpoints for the new version of our app:
-> smartphone: for spontaneous changes to the schedules if other touchpoints are unavailable to the therapist
-> tablet: for therapy sessions with autistic children
-> desktop: therapists prefer to create and edit schedules using their PCs

You can read more about the redesign in our presentation (PL) (EN) also explore the interactive prototype of the new app (PL).

Child view

Plan view

Preparing a task

License

The project is developed by people who want to make other people's lives easier. Because of that Friendly Plans is going to be free to use, download and develop for everybody, forever. Except as otherwise noted, this software is licensed under the GNU General Public License, v3.

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