OBJECTIVES

Clinical guidelines for the management of children/adolescents with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) recommend that caregivers and teachers contribute to the assessment of behaviors and symptoms and resulting treatment decisions. Caregivers of children/adolescents with ADHD lack a way to easily and consistently monitor their child’s progress at home or at school. Having the ability to track symptoms and behaviors in an accessible and user-friendly digital platform could help caregivers gain valuable insights into the child’s functioning and treatment progress and enable meaningful conversations with the child, child’s teacher and HCPs.

METHODS

AKL-X01 is a caregiver mobile application in development for use by caregivers of children/adolescents with ADHD to collectively track behavior and ADHD symptoms. An alpha build of AKL-X01 was based on user research with caregivers and teachers. The alpha AKL-X01 application was released for beta testing from May-Sept 2018, enabling caregivers to select and track behaviors and ADHD symptoms, view visualizations of tracked behaviors over time, and invite and give consent to teachers to track via a complementary web app. It also sent reminders to parents to track.

RESULTS

Beta testing of AKL-X01 was conducted with 125 caregivers of children/adolescents with ADHD (7 to 17 years of age). Data from online survey respondents (n=55/125), semi-structured interviews (n=14/125) and user tracking (all 125 caregivers) explored three key objectives:

• Usability: Assessing usability and comprehension of app
• Value: Understanding whether AKL-X01 delivered value in real-world implementation; in particular, to facilitate meaningful conversations with the child, HCPs and teachers
• Engagement: Test whether habit formation occurred with a minimum viable product.

CONCLUSIONS

Data from the beta test of AKL-X01 showed positive caregiver feedback, regular tracking in over 25% of users through the end of testing and promising results for enabling meaningful conversations with children and their HCPs.