A Mobile Application with Geolocation and Virtual Rewards for Promoting Social Skills in People with Social Disorders

The objective of this work is presenting a mobile platform for improving the individual development of social skills of people with mental disorders, offering them a mobile application which promotes independence and enhances social and cognitive abilities by means of geolocation and ludic reward. First, in order to improve the independence of the people with mental disorders we promote outings and physical activity by means of a mobile application which provides a personal map where familiar living places are located. In the map, the current location of the user is referenced between the familiar places. Additionally, the location is collected in a cloud server, where relatives and caregivers can locate him/her in case of need by SMS. Second, in order to improve their social skills, a mobile system of ludic rewards has been implemented using NFC tags. In this way, when the person with social disorder fulfills his/her tasks properly, the caregiver or family member brings closer an NFC tag with the value of the corresponding reward to the smartphone. So, the person with disabilities is able to check in the mobile application the reward points which he/she keeps based on his/her middle-term behavior. The virtual ludic money allows the child or person to enjoy activities, such as, watching TV, subtracting those points when they spend this reward. The system is developed as an easily scalable and configurable module to enable the personalization of parameters for each person with social disorder.