CalmReminder: A Design Probe for Parental Engagement with Children with Hyperactivity, Augmented by Real-Time Motion Sensing with a Watch

TL;DR

CalmReminder is presented, a watch-based system that detects children's calm moments and delivers just-in-time prompts to parents, and shows that parents are not passive recipients but active designers, reshaping interventions to fit their parenting styles.

Abstract

Families raising children with ADHD often experience heightened stress and reactive parenting. While digital interventions promise personalization, many remain one-size-fits-all and fail to reflect parents' lived practices. We present CalmReminder, a watch-based system that detects children's calm moments and delivers just-in-time prompts to parents. Through a four-week deployment with 16 families (twelve completed) of children with ADHD, we compared notification strategies ranging from hourly to random to only when the child was inferred to be calm. Our sensing-based notifications were frequently perceived as arriving during calm moments. More importantly, parents adopted the system in diverse ways: using notifications for praise, mindfulness, activity planning, or conversation. These findings show that parents are not passive recipients but active designers, reshaping interventions to fit their parenting styles. We contribute a calm detection pipeline, empirical insights into families' flexible appropriation of notifications, and design implications for intervention systems that foster agency.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Overview of the developed CalmReminder system. A child with hyperactivity wears a smartwatch with our custom app (A), which continuously sends IMU data to our server. The server periodically sends notifications to the phone app (B) on the parent's phone ➀, where they respond to the delivered reflection prompts ➁. We conducted a four-week study to explore different notification strategies: none, hourly, random, and calm-only.
• Figure 2: Example scenario with CalmReminder as observed in our four-week in-home study. A child with hyperactivity wears a smartwatch (A) that detects calm moments through motion sensing (B). When the parent, occupied with daily tasks, receives a notification, they are reminded to offer positive reinforcement (C). This reinforcement strengthens the parent-child relationship (D). Our study further revealed diverse ways families appropriated CalmReminder's features based on their parental values and practices. Each picture was generated by ChatGPT-5.
• Figure 3: Overview of our four-week study involving different intraday notification strategies: none, hourly, random, and calm-only.
• Figure 4: Parents with diverse pre-existing management strategies (left) appropriated CalmReminder features to design distinct interventions (right) through two mechanisms: amplifying existing practices (green flows) or expanding into new management domains (gray flows). Most relationship-focused parents (P3, P4, P9, P10) amplified their relational approaches, while three of four antecedent-focused parents (P6, P8, P12) expanded from physical to psychological strategies. P1 and P5 did not adopt features during the study period.
• Figure 5: Baseline self-reported parental stress as a gating factor for system adoption. Distribution of participants across baseline stress levels (1=low, 5=high) by adoption outcome. Adopters (n=10, green circles) are distributed across all stress levels, and most have lower baseline stress scores. Dropouts who withdrew mid-study (n=4, gray triangles) - cluster exclusively at high stress levels ($>3$). This pattern suggests that extreme baseline stress precludes initial engagement, rather than as a continuous predictor of appropriation patterns among those who do engage.