ACE – Promising Apps Tony Gentry Transcription provided by: Caption First, Inc. >> TONY GENTRY: Welcome to a VCU Autism Center of Excellence video log. This is Tony Gentry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Let's look at some promising add-on apps that can help make your iPhone, your iPad Touch, or your iPad a more versatile, cognitive behavioral tool. Picture Scheduler has lots of promise. It's the only app I've seen that allows you to create a reminder alarm which can be a repeating reminder alarm, and a pin to that, either a picture or a video showing the person doing the task that the alarm has asked them to do. For instance, you could have brush your teeth at 7 o'clock in the morning. That goes off and the video pops up showing a child brushing their teeth correctly. This is just a $2.99 app, available on the Apple App Store. Story Kit is an app designed to help you create interactive talking storybooks for your children. But there are creative ways to use it as a task sequencing app as well. Nothing's stopping you, for instance, from creating a book that really is a series of task instructions. Way finding, return directions in the community, behavioral modification cues, social stories, all of these are available to you in Story Kit, allowing you to create a talking set of prompts to help a person perform more functionally in their everyday life. This is a free app available on the App Store. Mental Note is a $2.99 app available only for the iPad, but it is amazing, allowing you to create a note that includes photographs, hand-drawn pictures, instructions, audio, all put together in one place so you can again, use this for task sequencing, for behavioral management, for social stories, for way finding, etc. There are lots of healthy living apps available. Two that I'm partial to are Lose It! and All End Fitness. Lose It! is a free app that counts calories expended with exercise and calories taken in with food and graphs for you how well you're doing in weight loss over time. All End Fitness allows you to set up an exercise routine. It includes videos and pictures to help you perform the different exercises that you've selected. This is a $2.99 app on the App Store. The Veteran's Administration has created a number of free apps that are designed for behavior modification and health. PTSD Coach, Mood Tracker, Tactical Breathing Trainer, Breathe to Relax, and for the Android devices, Mild TBI. These apps are designed to help you log in how you're feeling or what your situation is, and to provide coaching tips to help you get through that situation to improve your health. As I said before, these are free apps. iCounselor has created a series of $.99 apps that follow a similar model; one for OCD, for anxiety, for fear, and for depression. In all cases you rate the situation that you're feeling right now and the app gives you suggestions for how to solve the problem you're having. If you don't like the solution they come up with, you can choose another and move on through the app that way. Simply Being is one of many meditation or relaxation apps available. Simply Being allows you to program in gentle nature pictures along with New Age music which can be timed to go off at a particular time to help you go to sleep or to help you meditate or relax. Any cogitative rehabilitation therapist will tell you that sleep is a very important part of thinking clearly. The ZO (ph) is a free-standing device that tracks brain waves to help you see how well you slept during the night. Sleep Cycle is a $.99 app for portable devices that does the same thing. This uses the accelerometer in the iPhone or the iPod Touch to track how well you're sleeping during the night and print out a graph for you to see how that worked out. There are plenty of rehabilitation and disability-specific apps available now. Dexteria is a hand therapy app. Look Tel is a money reader, it actually uses the camera on your device to read paper money and tell you what it is. My Epilepsy Diary is exactly that, a way to track seizure activity and report it to your caregiver or to your doctor. For people who are new to touch-screen devices or if you're just trying to build interest in using the device, games are a very good place to start. Three that I'm partial to are Bubble Popper which helps with screen tapping. Labyrinth LE, a maze game that helps you learn how to use the accelerometer feature on the device, the tilting feature. And all of the Game Center games which allow you to play games with other people who have similar devices over the Internet no matter where they are. This can be a boon to social interaction. Personal locaters like InstaMapper and Foursquare are free apps for the iPhone that are designed to help people call their friends to the location where they're at, the bar or the restaurant that they're visiting. They also work well for people with cognitive behavioral challenges for caregivers to find them if they wander off or get lost. Important to remember that these are broadcasting locations constantly as text messages, so they work best with iPhones that have unlimited data plans. Some of these personal locaters work on other smartphones as well. Music and drawing apps are not just for creativity, but can also work as stress relievers. The musician, Brian Eno has created a pair of these, Bloom and Trope, that coordinate transmusic and slow-moving images to create a very relaxing and interactive experience. If you are a teacher or therapist who works with people who have behavioral challenges, you may want to pick up a behavior tracker. Behavior Tracker Pro and Skill Tracker Pro are expensive at $29 on the App Store, but they do a very good job of tracking behaviors across time, recording those behaviors and allowing you to think through how you might deal with or find an antecedent for behavior and to solve it in the future. Many of my clients are learning the basics of money management. I like Expenses, $1.99 app. This is a simple app that just keeps track of where your money's going. It doesn't link to your bank account or to the web, it's held on the device itself, but it gives you a pretty good understanding of money coming in and money coming out and how to balance that. If you're getting ready for the school year, you can use the calendars that come with these devices to keep track of your homework and assignments, but there are a couple of really good apps that help you do a better job of that. iHomework and iStudiez Pro. iStudiez Pro is especially interesting because the information on that app connects to the calendar on your device so you don't have to record it in two different places. As you probably know, you can use an iPod touch or an iPad as a cell phone as long as you have Internet access. Skype, Line2, Fring, and FaceTime are all options. The world of personal technology turns over and changes every day. That means on eBay and in your closet perhaps there are devices that work perfectly well as cognitive behavioral tools but which are from last year or the year before. I'm thinking of the old Palm Pilots, Pocket PC's, the Timex Data Link watch, those products. Some of these work really, really well and you might want to consider taking those out and using them rather than buying the more expensive new product which will be next year's legacy product. Look to other installments of the VCU ACE video logs for closer looks at some of these apps. This is Tony Gentry, Department of Occupational Therapy, and VCU ACE, Virginia Commonwealth University. Thank you.