Children’s Emotional Communication App
Very cold egg.It started because I wanted something useful to code
I was learning to build things and looking for actual problems to solve.
Not another tutorial calculator.
Not another programme that asks for your name and triumphantly prints:
Hello, Sue!
Something somebody might genuinely find useful.
And I started thinking about children who know perfectly well that something is wrong but can’t easily tell anybody what it is.
Very young children.
Non-speaking autistic children.
Children who struggle to identify, organise or articulate what they’re feeling, particularly when they’re already distressed.
Because that’s a fairly horrible mismatch.
The moment when communicating clearly becomes most important may be exactly the moment when communicating clearly becomes hardest.
So make the communication simpler
The idea was an extremely simple app.
No chatbot.
No AI therapist.
No attempt to diagnose the child or interpret their behaviour from afar.
Just a visual interface that lets the child communicate by tapping.
How do you feel?
Angry.
Scared.
Sad.
Overwhelmed.
Confused.
Uncomfortable.
Too noisy.
Want to be alone.
Need help.
The precise vocabulary and interface would obviously need proper development with people who actually work in this area — and, importantly, with autistic and non-speaking people themselves.
But the principle was straightforward.
Reduce the amount of language required between:
I am experiencing something
and
the adult responsible for me understands enough to respond.
The person receiving that information might be a parent.
Teacher.
Carer.
Teaching assistant.
Clinician.
Whoever the child needs to understand them at that moment.
And then…
I didn’t build it.
There was no dramatic technical failure.
I didn’t discover halfway through development that Google required me to authorise myself to authorise myself.
I hadn’t even reached the stage where anything could go wrong.
It remained an idea.
And unlike some of my abandoned coding projects, I’m quite glad I didn’t simply charge ahead with this one.
Something intended for children with communication difficulties needs more than a person with a laptop thinking:
“This seems useful.”
The interface, vocabulary, accessibility, safeguarding and assumptions behind it would need to be shaped by the people who would actually use it.
So it stayed where it was.
In the incubator.
Current condition
Very cold egg.
The problem still seems real.
The basic idea still seems sensible.
Whether my version of the solution would have been useful is an entirely different question.
For now, it remains one of the things I thought perhaps I could build…
…and wisely didn’t immediately decide that meant I should.