Daily planning

When Anton Håkanson embarked on a school project in assistive technology, he decided to construct an appointment calendar that autistic individuals would find easy to use. He calls his calendar, ‘Snailday’.

Visual structure

Håkanson wanted to address the problem of a reminder system for people who require a great deal of visual structure. Among the features of Snailday are: time visualization; the ability to browse a schedule by icons representing various activities or appointments; simple structure; customizable color settings, and so on. Although there are calendars that incorporate some of these features, at present there is no single platform designed for those who require visual structure.

Håkanson presented his project at a Health Hackathon and found that many people were interested in this type of application. Based on this interest, Hakanson and developer Lukas Mattson began further work on a more robust version of this calendar. During development Håkanson and Mattson tested their application with autistic individuals and autism experts. They received a lot of positive feedback.

What remains to be determined is the target population for this application. Since there are varying degrees of autism, from low functioning to very high functioning, with varying degrees of visual and other sensory issues, it is difficult if not impossible to predict which individuals would benefit from this reminder system. More information is available at the Snailday website.

The following is the press release for Snailday, courtesy of the authors, Anton Håkanson and Lukas Mattson:

Something most people can relate to is that planing a daily schedule can be a challenging and stressful task. But for people with autism it’s a even greater challenge to remember daily tasks or manage daily stress. Therefore there’s a need for a calendar specialized for people with autism.

We are a small but dedicated team of designers and developers creating a digital calendar for people with autism. We call it Snailday and it will make it easier to browse and be reminded of daily routines.

So for Snailday there are four needs that we want to include.

1. It’s very important to be able to browse images to view what needs to be done during the day.
2. How long time there is left for a task needs to be displayed so it’s easy to understand.
3. If you forget about your task it’s important that you get a reminder.
4. It’s important that parents, teachers, and mentors can help the autistic person by adding to the calendar.

To display the current time we have a little snail that moves forward in your schedule. Every time your snail reach a reminder at a certain time you will be reminded with a notification sound and images describing what you need to do at that time.

All reminders during the day will be placed in one big scroll view so the reminders that the snail has past is completed and the reminders in front of the snail will start in the near future depending on how far ahead they are placed.

But for an autistic person it can sometimes be very stressful to start doing a task at the same time he/she gets reminded. So we have also include preparation and finishing time. So when the snail gets to the activity it’s time to start preparing for the next task.

When or snail has climbed a task then another reminders starts so the autistic person knows that it’s time to start the task. This will help to minimize stress and make the autistic person feel more prepared for the day.

Also we are building a system for Snailday that makes it easy to share schedules and add reminders from another device. So for example you can add a reminder from your computer that instantly will be added to your kid’s iPhone.

This makes it possible for parents, teachers and mentors to add reminders for the autistic person during the day.

We have been talking to people experiencing this problem – both people with autism, and people living with people who are autistic. We are building Snailday on our free time, and to make it a real product and make it accessible on the platforms necessary, we need funding. Therefore, we will start a crowd funding campaign on the Autism Awareness Day, the 2nd of April. If you like our project then please help us make the development of Snailday possible.