WeLi: A Smartwatch Application to Assist Students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Hui Zheng, Vivian Genaro Motti · 2017 · Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17) · doi:10.1145/3132525.3134770
Summary
This poster paper presents WeLi (Wearable Life), a smartwatch application designed to assist students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs) in post-secondary educational environments. The system was developed for and deployed at Mason Life, a programme at George Mason University that provides young adults with IDDs a supportive university experience. In these settings, each student receives continuous assistance from a staff member who sits nearby during classes, intervening to prompt focus, remind students when to ask questions, and keep them calm or on task. However, having a staff member constantly alongside a student can cause discomfort and stigma. WeLi addresses this by enabling staff to sit at the rear of the classroom and send discreet, personalised notifications to the student's smartwatch from a paired mobile phone. Notifications appear on screen after a brief 800ms vibration to minimise class disturbance while remaining noticeable. The app was developed through a user-centred design process involving semi-structured interviews with 3 staff members, five focus groups (3 with staff, 2 with students), and a survey of 32 staff members. This process yielded eight features: prompting, self-regulation, checklist, countdown, alarm, survey, rewards, and settings.
Key findings
The user-centred design process identified five core features through focus groups: prompting (staff-initiated reminders and interventions), self-regulation (tools for students to manage their own mood and behaviour), checklist (task tracking), countdown (time management), and alarm. A subsequent survey with 32 staff members added three more features: survey (for collecting student feedback), rewards (positive reinforcement), and settings (customisation). The system integrates a mobile component (for staff) with a wearable component (for students), allowing both manual and automatically programmed notifications that are personalised and flexible. Initial user studies showed that both students and staff were enthusiastic about adopting the technology in classroom settings. The wearable form factor was specifically chosen because it is discreet, always available on the wrist, and does not require the student to carry or manage an additional device — reducing both stigma and cognitive load compared to phone-based or paper-based intervention systems.
Relevance
WeLi demonstrates how consumer wearable technology can be repurposed as an assistive tool that reduces stigma while maintaining support for students with IDDs in inclusive educational settings. For accessibility practitioners, the key design insight is that the form factor of assistive technology matters as much as its functionality — moving intervention from a visible human assistant to a discreet wrist vibration fundamentally changes the social dynamics of receiving support. The paper also highlights the value of including both staff and students with IDDs in the design process through interviews, focus groups, and surveys. While this is a short poster paper without extensive evaluation data, it points to the largely unexplored potential of smartwatches in special education, particularly for self-regulation, discrete prompting, and reducing the dependency on constant human presence.
Tags: wearable technology · intellectual disability · developmental disability · special education · self-regulation · assistive technology · smartwatch