Apps and a game to support children with neurodivergence and Adhd, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

An App and a game to support children with neurodivergence and Adhd, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. 'TapTino: Attention is in your hands!' is the name of the project supported by the new crowdfunding campaign launched by the University of Milan-Bicocca as part of the 8th edition of the BiUniCrowd programme, which aims to raise €10,000 to develop an innovative game tool of concrete utility. Through the Milan university's BiUniCrowd programme, selected research projects are funded by involving civil society, institutions and businesses through crowdfunding on the Ideaginger.it platform.

As far as TapTino is concerned, explains Anna Lambiase, the project's team leader, 'it all started because of a university delivery: finding a research question that had never been published before. With Alessio Di Nunzio, a member of the team and a student of Psychology at Bicocca, we wanted to do something different, something that could be realised in the future. We thus combined my passion for assistive robotics with his desire to get involved in circuits'. Attention deficit disorder, Lambiase continues, 'is a different way of managing impulses and emotions, maintaining concentration and planning actions. Everyone functions differently. Many children, in order to regain balance and self-regulate, feel the need to move repeatedly. The brain constantly seeks stimuli and then struggles to use the internal 'brake'. We want to see if TapTino can channel this energy, without repressing it, into an engaging play activity that supports the activities while respecting the child's time.

The interactive keyboard incites fine movement, i.e. that of the hands, making the action a cognitive enhancement tool. 'TapTino,' Lambiase describes, 'delivers game-based light sequences from actual keys, thus stimulating the tactile sensory channel. Through play, we hope to reinforce attention and memory of the experience, stimulating the related neural circuits, as well as enhancing the emotional impact. We wanted to propose a solution that was linked to a physical product to be connected to an experience, that could be carried around or put on desks, used by both adults and children".

The TapTino team has already developed a working prototype, which was presented to several parents interviewed and appeared at various events in 2025, such as the International Conference of Child-Robot Interaction and the i-Bicocca trail. In order to move from ideas to concrete actions, the financial target to be reached is 10,000 euros, needed to test and validate the project. The collected budget will be entirely used to develop the dedicated App with the software interface, necessary to manage games and data, and to produce a first series of 10 TapTino devices to be sent free of charge to interested families and available for use to support research. TapTino will in fact have the capacity to collect data in real time for a scientifically validated product.