Professor Piano: a music application for people with intellectual disabilities

Abstract

In this paper it is presented a music application for people with intellectual disabilities, called "Professor Piano". We created this application to be a solution for music education for this group of people. For that we present the development and implementation of the app. We choose the virtual piano and the mobile devices as the basis for our solution. It was conducted an assessment of the current status and features of mobile applications also using this paradigm, from which we concluded that, currently, there is not a virtual piano application oriented to people with intellectual disabilities so we design, develop and tested a new application, the "Professor Piano". To validate the "Professor Piano" application approach, we evaluated the application usage by a group of people with intellectual disabilities, without having too much user experience with mobile technologies, with the aim to measure the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. We registered the following variables: success in a conclusion of a level (effectiveness); the percentage of correct notes played versus all notes of that level (efficiency); and the motivation at the end of the experience (satisfaction). The results obtained shows the interest and motivation of the users in playing with the application. In the four tests, three persons completed and wanted to continue the testing experience. This results also shows the importance of using an intuitive design and also of displaying the score at the end of each level, giving an extra boost to the user to replay or advance to the next level. © 2016 ACM.