Designing a wearable technology application for enhancing executive functioning skills in children with ADHD
Abstract
There are limitations and poor adherence to pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions when treating children with ADHD. Wearable technology has great potential to overcome this limitation due to their portability and capability to measure biosignals. Unfortunately, the acceptance of this technology in children with ADHD has not been explored. The purpose of this study was to understand the acceptability of wearables and propose designs for applications to enhance executive functioning in these children. Results from a qualitative study involving children with ADHD and their teachers showed that concerns from the children outweighed the advantages for using smartwatch technology, and suggested that an application should mimic the current practices of self-regulation taught at their school and be able to monitor self-reflection of mood and behavior. These findings suggest that wearables can potentially be used as interventions supporting the executive function of children with ADHD.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Across HCI studies, there is a tendency to design systems that address perceived neurodivergent behaviours from an external viewpoint without adequately considering internal struggles.
“Across a number of studies [9, 29, 30, 39, 54, 55, 64, 74, 81, 90, 93], there is a noticeable tendency to design systems that address perceived neurodivergent behaviours, often from an external viewpoint, without adequately considering the internal struggles experienced by neurodivergent individuals.”
From Burnout by Design: How Digital Systems Overburden Neurodivergent Students in Higher Education (2025) · cites this paper as [81]
Cites
Faraone, S. V. (2018) · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.02.001 · Cited by 631 · see citing works
Catalá-López, F., Hutton, B., Núñez-Beltrán, A., Page, M. J., Ridao, M., Macías Saint-Gerons, D., Catalá, M. A., Tabarés-Seisdedos, R., & Moher, D. (2017) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0180355 · Cited by 396 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
ADHD and Technology Research – Investigated by Neurodivergent Readers
Spiel, K., Hornecker, E., Williams, R. M., & Good, J. (2022) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3491102.3517592 · Cited by 150 · see citing works
Burnout by Design: How Digital Systems Overburden Neurodivergent Students in Higher Education
Tcherdakoff, N. A., Marshall, P., Dowthwaite, A., Bird, J., & Cox, A. L. (2025) · Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work · doi:10.1145/3729176.3729193 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
“This paper makes a novel contribution by centring the lived experiences of neurodivergent university students and uncovering the critical role of digital system design in shaping their academic success and emotional wellbeing [9, 29, 30, 39, 54, 55, 64, 74, 81, 90, 93].”
- Authors
- Tavakoulnia, A., Guzman, K., Cibrian, F. L., Lakes, K. D., Hayes, G., & Schuck, S. E. B.
- Affiliations
- University of California System (US)
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- Venue
- Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-09-09
- Pages
- 222-225
- OpenAlex
- W2973223116
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 6.55
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) (publishedVersion)
- ACM Proceedings
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (1R21HS026058-01A1)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Mobile Health and mHealth Applications
- Keywords
- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, wearable devices, executive function, children, smartwatches, technology acceptance, self-regulation, mobile health apps, teacher perceptions
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
