Relafapp’s story
I have a friend. We used to go to the same university but had not been close to each other until 3 years ago, when we accidentally met at a small cafe in Hanoi. We had had a nice talk about things in university, our careers… until he told me about his family…
He has a wonderful wife, a good job and a big house at the centre of the city but he has a son who is the reason that makes he feels broken-hearted. He is physically normal, yet he seems to have lots of difficulties in communicating. He often gets panic, sometimes wistful and usually sits alone at the corner of a room.
My friend and his wife have tried to send him to many high-quality kindergarten, however at nowhere did his situation get improved. All the kindergartens complained that he often screamed, cried out loud suddenly or even banged his head to the walls when he disliked anything. When at home, he rarely talked and his only toy was a green rubber ball.
They also spent lots of money getting medical checked for him and eventually they were shocked to know that their son had autism. People like him usually find it difficult to communicate with others. They have a unique manner to see the world, which is different to the way we do. Some of them even are genious.
I felt really sympathetic to my friend’s family and started to spend more time researching about autism. From the information i searched on the internet, i found out that autism is quite popular in the world, many people are in this condition. There are 700.000 kids in UK have autism and in USA, there is 1 in 68 kids have this, such considerable figures. Being a father, i feel pity for those kids who have this as well as worried about the popularization of autism nowadays. However, with limited medical knowledge of a UI/UX, I don’t know if I can do anything to help kids like my friend’s son. At that time, I was researching to develop an application playing music by mixing different sounds.
I met my friend again months after that day. He told me that he had sent his son to a special education centre for kids with autism. I told him that I would like to visit his family and give his son a toy. When i met the boy, I gave him a small plastic keyboard which played animal sounds when he touched the frets.
I realized that he was interested in the toy and absorbed in playing with it. I came by and asked him if I could play with. To my surprise, he was quite friendly even though he didn’t talk much. And I came up with an idea that music can be an useful therapy for people like him. But it was just my personal assumption. Can we apply this method for all kids with autism? I was confused and asked my friend if i could visit his son’s class and play with the children there. And he said of course I could.
At that time I didn’t have many modern smart phone or tablet, one 3.5-inch asus cellphone and 1 old HP laptop. One was too small while the other was too big. I decided to buy a $60 made-in-China tablet and a $10 wireless loudspeaker. I tied a string around the loudspeaker, carried it on my neck and went to the boy’s class.
That was the first time I had contacted with a group of children with autism. Each of them had a different reaction when they saw me but mostly stayed cautious and away from me except for my friend’s boy. He might still remember me, thus he came over, looked at me surprisingly but said nothing. I sat down, played some pieces of music I had prepared mixing sounds of birds, streams, wind… After a few minutes of hesitation, other kids started heading for us. I waved to them and they came closer. I changed different sounds and observe their attitude. They seemed to be interested the loudspeaker and my action. One even held my loudspeaker and pulled it. Some touched my tablet with pleasure showed on their faces… I had great time with those kids. What a pity that I couldn’t spend more time playing with them. I gave the memory card to the center manager and gave the tablet to my friend. Put the loudspeaker on the neck of my friend’s son, I came home feeling happy. I realized that those special kids need being especially cared from family and society. And music could be the shortest way leading us to touch those kids’ souls and normal ones as well.
And that’s how we came up with Relax-in-the-fantasy. We, the Relaf’s creators, hope that this application can somehow contribute to bring better things to those unfavorable kids in particular and to all of us in general.
