KeepCalm
The KeepCalm app is designed to be an interactive learning and data collection tool to facilitate a team approach to supporting emotion regulation in students. It integrates wearable heart rate tracking to identify and alert educators of heightened stress in their students and remind of them of evidence-based strategies for deescalating stress, supporting proactive coping and preventing challenging behaviors. The KeepCalm app is currently designed for educational teams of preschool and elementary students on the autism spectrum and is funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health.
The KeepCalm app offers several features designed to make it easier to know when and how to intervene with children to support their proactive coping and emotion regulation development:
Heart Rate Stress Zone Tracking
The KeepCalm app pairs with select commercially available heart rate trackers (MioFuse wristband or Polar H7 chest-strap) that children wear to provide in-the-moment physiological stress tracking by educational teams. Educators can track the child’s stress and intervene at low-moderate stress levels so to prevent challenging behaviors associated with high stress levels and create emotion regulation learning opportunities. Educators are given pop-up notifications to alert them of moderate stress levels along with individualized top strategies that can be used to reduce their stress.
Individualized Child Behavior, Skills, Triggers and Strategies Tracking
The KeepCalm app is designed to help educators and parents track children’s individualized education programs in a centralized way. Teams can create custom profiles for each child for individualized tracking of challenging behaviors, skills, behavioral triggers and antecedents, and strategies for that child and sync data entry across the team.
Top Strategy Notifications
The KeepCalm app offers individualized “top strategy” suggestions from an up-to-date list of evidence-based strategies for supporting emotion regulation and preventing challenging behaviors in children with autism. The top strategies are individualized per child based on previous data collection and heart rate tracking.
Evidence-Based Strategy Resources
The app provides resources (infographics and videos) on the implementation of evidence- based strategies to help support emotion regulation and prevent challenging behaviors in children with autism. These strategies come from the research team’s comprehensive systematic review of the literature presented at the American Public Health Association 2021 conference by the project Principal Investigator, Dr. Heather Nuske.
Day View
The KeepCalm app includes a “Day View” tab with a daily report including two versions. The first is a detailed day view that includes each data entry in list and figure format, and the second is a summary day view that includes a narrative description of the day including the top strategies used that day. This downloadable report is auto generated at the end of each day and sent out to the team via pop-up notification to support frequent team communication.
Custom Reports
The KeepCalm app includes a “Reports” tab where teams can produce clear and concise tables and figures to present data on each child’s challenging behaviors, skills, behavioral triggers and antecedents, and strategies for upcoming education team meetings and to share with parents. These downloadable reports be used to may help with noticing trends and for evidence-based programming to support children’s development.
Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA) Mode
The KeepCalm app includes an FBA mode to help team take data to determine the function or reason of new or emerging challenging behaviors to help with deciding on strategies for these behaviors. Behavioral analysts can be added to the child’s KeepCalm team for easy sharing of FBA data.
Team Messaging
The KeepCalm app offer a team messaging platform to aid team communication, which is important for consistency of strategy use across school teams and with home. Teams can also contact the app development team in real-time for troubleshooting.