THE C@ROLIN@ SOFTWARE - A System for Monitoring Skills Development of Children with Down Syndrome

The study of medical protocols for monitoring and analyzing the cognitive development of children with disabilities is a fundamental research area. In this context, a well established curriculum-based assessment is the Carolina Curriculum for Infants and Toddlers with Special Needs(CCITSN). This is a suitable curriculum for early intervention programs, where sequenced items data collection and analysis allow for monitoring, incremental program change, and recognition of areas of relative strength and weakness in children with mild, moderate, or severe disabilities. This paper describes the design and the development of an information system based on a client-server software application, named C@rolin@, which carries out all CCITSN abilities and more, for the monitoring and the analysis of data coming from a medical protocol for children with the Down syndrome. In particular, by means of user-friendly graphic interfaces, the C@rolin@ software helps users to add, modify, recover, and analyze data, to watch singular and aggregate data via customized reports, as well as to interpolate data among children to determine or prevent specific behaviors.