Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science and Statistics

First Advisor

Krishna Venkatasubramanian

Abstract

People in the United States living with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) often experience trauma at a disproportionate rate. Due to societal and personal barriers, individuals with I/DD have problems with gaining access to therapy, thus often having to live with the negative effects of their untreated trauma. The effects of untreated trauma can cause severe impairment which affects a person’s quality of life and emotional, social, and physical development.

Post-trauma self-regulation is a way of doing activities to regulate one’s emotions to help cope with the negative effects of trauma. It has been shown as an effective method of helping individuals with I/DD momentarily cope with their trauma, and has been used complementary to therapy. It has also been shown that individuals with I/DD are avid users of mobile computing devices. To this end, we present the prototyping and design of Bodhi, a post-trauma self-regulation mobile computing app for people with I/DD.

We first create a initial prototype, based on prior research we have done with the I/DD community. To evaluate this initial prototype, we did a user study with lay members of the I/DD community, recruiting (5) people with I/DD. These participants represent the eventual users of the app. After gathering their feedback, we found that while participants enjoyed the prototype, the self-care activities in the prototype needed to be fleshed out, and other features reworked. We analyzed the findings and incorporated these ideas when creating Bodhi, a fully-functioning mobile computing app. We did another user study, again with five (5) new individuals with I/DD, and analyzed the findings. We analyzed this feedback, and found that participants largely enjoyed Bodhi and would use it for self-regulation. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our research and identify future areas of research that should be explored.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Available for download on Wednesday, May 27, 2026

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