Background

People with Down syndrome might experience difficulties identifying and expressing their emotions. These skills are part of their emotional awareness. Problems developing emotional awareness can cause anxiety and depression, and in some cases, behaviors that affect physical and mental health and social and labor inclusion.

Some interventions for supporting emotional awareness in other populations have been adapted for people with Down syndrome. Also, different video games have been suggested to complement these interventions. The literature proposes using serious video games to support developmental skills in children with Down syndrome, which have been shown to help them maintain their attention and motivation. However, more work is needed to support people with Down syndrome's emotional awareness through interactive technology. Emotion4Down is a serious video game to support the emotional awareness of people with Down syndrome. 

This project was presented as a short paper at the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children 2019 and the Eight Mexican Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (MexIHC 2021). The results of a formative evaluation of Emotion4Down were published in an indexed journal.