MOBILE & WIRELESS HEALTH The Design and Validation of a Child Developmental e-Screening System Hsin-Yi Kathy Cheng 1,2 & Hsien-Tsung Chang 3 & Po-Hsin Huang 4 & Yan-Ying Ju 5 & Li-Ying Chen 1 & Kevin C. Tseng 2,4,6,7 Received: 9 January 2017 /Accepted: 5 February 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract An effective screening test could significantly impact identification of developmental delays at an early age. However, many studies have shown that delay screen- ings still use text-based screening survey questionnaires. Unfortunately, the traditional text-based screening method tends to be fairly passive. In addition, the advantages of using an interactive system and animation have been shown to lead to positive effects on learning in medical research. Therefore, a multimedia screening system is nec- essary. This study constructs a system architecture to de- velop an e-screening system for child developmental de- lays. To validate the system after development, this study conducted an experiment and employed a questionnaire to survey users. Five experts and 120 subjects participated in the experiment. After the experiment, the results of the system evaluation revealed excellent agreement between the text-based and multimedia version of Taipei II. A total of 118 (98%) participants preferred the multimedia version or had no preference, and only 2 (2%) preferred the paper version. Regular text-based screening sometimes excludes those with low literacy and those whose native language is different from the text. In addition, text-based screening tools lose users’ attention easily. The current study suc- cessfully developed a multimedia text-based screening sys- tem. Feedback from the participants showed that the e- screening system was well accepted and more easily acces- sible than the original. In this study, a child developmental delays e-screening system was developed. After the exper- iment, the subjects indicated that the developmental delay e-screening system increased their comprehension and kept them interested in the screening. Keywords Child development . Early intervention . Screening . System design Introduction The early development of children is an important process. During early age, the movement, language, and social ability of children affects their learning performance and interperson- al relationships. Therefore, early interventions play an impor- tant role in children’s development. Early screening is key for implementing early interventions. The development of an evaluation system that is simple, convenient and practicable for the children and their parents is critical. The system could This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile & Wireless Health. * Kevin C. Tseng ktseng@pddlab.org 1 Graduate Institute of Early Intervention, College of Medicine, Chang Gung University, Guishan, Taoyuan, Taiwan 2 Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Guishan, Taoyuan, Taiwan 3 Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, College of Engineering, Chang Gung University, Guishan, Taoyuan, Taiwan 4 Department of Industrial Design, College of Management, Chang Gung University, Guishan, Taoyuan, Taiwan 5 Department of Adapted Physical Education, National Taiwan Sport University, Guishan, Taoyuan, Taiwan 6 Healthy Aging Research Center, Chang Gung University , Guishan, Taoyuan, Taiwan 7 Department of Industrial Design, College of Management and Design, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City, Taiwan J Med Syst (2017) 41:67 DOI 10.1007/s10916-017-0701-z