Picture Me Calm

Appy Chat & Giveaway

Developer: Awesometistic, LLC

 

Description:

Picture Me Calm is an easy to use picture schedule system for children.
✩ Create unlimited picture cards and schedules
✩ Relieve anxiety and provide positive support for your child

Fidgety Fingers
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Children are explorers. They like to touch and interact with everything. With this in mind, we designed Picture Me Calm to reduce the amount issues that can arise from ‘fidgety fingers’. The only interaction children can perform is changing the current schedule, completing tasks by flipping picture cards and selecting a sticker reward at the end of the completed schedule.

Designed with Love
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Picture Me Calm was designed as a visual picture schedule for our daughter who has high functioning autism. As it turned out, it worked exceptionally well for our typical children as well. Each child can have one or more visual schedules tailored to their needs and abilities with pictures of themselves performing the tasks.

Additional Features
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✓ iPhone 5 ready
✓ iPad ready
✓ Children are rewarded with a sticker on their sticker bar once a schedule is complete
✓ Arrange the picture cards into logical steps.
✓ Handcrafted design that does not get in the way of your child.
✓ Complete tasks by tapping the picture card. Tap again to change back to undone state.
✓ Swipe picture cards to move from task to task.

Specifications:

Category: Life Skills
Updated: 25 November, 2012
Version: 2.0
Language: English
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 5.0 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.

Links:

Website: http://www.picturemecalm.com
Facebook Page: Picture Me Calm
Twitter: @picturemecalm
App: Picture Me Calm

Appy Chat:

When did you decide to develop this app?
At the beginning of 2012, my wife and I were using a traditional PECS schedule for our daughter who has autism. We found that keeping her on task and focused for activities like getting ready for school or bed was extremely difficult without a visual schedule. The only problem was recreating the schedule each day was problematic and time consuming. Thus the idea of a digital picture schedule came about. Something that could be easily used and reset.

When did you first release this app?
We released the app at the end of October 2012.

How long did it take you to develop this app?
App development took approximately 6 months with and additional 2 months of testing with our children and with children of friends of ours. We wanted to make sure it was right and useful.

What is your favourite feature?
My wife loves that she can simply reset the picture schedule with the push of a button. I love the excitement that my daughter has when she completes a schedule and has the opportunity to select a sticker reward for her ‘sticker bar’ at the bottom of the schedule. We also love that instead of an abstract representation of brushing teeth (for example) can be made into a more concrete example of the child performing the task. We have noticed that children relate better to an image of themselves performing the tasks.

What skills were you hoping to help the end user to develop?
Ultimately, we wanted our daughter to develop a sense of independence and self esteem in the everyday activities that typical children and adults for that matter, take for granted. We hope that users of the app will feel that sense of accomplishment as well.

What age range would this app most suit?
This app will suit children that are not reading or special needs children of all ages.

Are any new updates coming soon?
We are excited to have several planned updates come out in the near future. Our next update will be the ability to export a picture card and send it to another Picture Me Calm user. We have found that in our everyday use, it’s important to have consistency in the picture cards. This ability will allow for the exact same schedule to be present on any device that family owns (iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch).

After that is complete, we hope to offer a high quality text to speech feature that will enhance the experience for those that may have limited sight or additional cognitive processing issues. Having the picture cards ‘speak’ is important to us.

We developed this app for our daughter. She uses it all the time. We feel its important for people to know that we are not going anywhere and will continue to enhance and refine as we receive feedback. There are other picture schedule apps out there and they are wonderful pieces of software. We hope that people will give ours a try 🙂

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Giveaway:

We have a Rafflecopter giveaway  until January 31, 2012