We use smartphones for everything: organizing tasks, paying bills, playing podcasts, shopping — the list goes on and on. But did you know that your clients can now use their smartphones to continue the progress they make during your sessions on their own time? Believe it or not, there’s a growing list of occupational therapy apps out there that are specifically designed to help you improve your clients’ skill development and functioning during therapy sessions and at home, no matter what your specialty. To help you out, we scoured the iTunes and Google Play stores to find the best OT apps on the market. Here are our favorite apps.
Best OT Apps for Visual Perception
1. Flow Free
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free (In-app purchases available)
Why You’ll Love It: This app is excellent for OTs working with patients with depth and color perception issues. The app requires users to connect matching colors with a pipe or flow, requiring spatial reasoning and planning. This addictive puzzle game involves connecting colors to cover the entire board, fostering visual and auditory feedback, visual motor planning, and spatial reasoning. The free version offers play with ads and includes hundreds of levels, and the difficulty ranges from casual to challenging to cover the entire visual schedule. To remove ads, the cost is just $0.99. The user interface is colorful and smooth, with fun sound effects and clean animated graphics. It is usable as a reward for working on other tasks or as a motor planning and visual motor accuracy tool.
2. RelationShapes
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free
Why You’ll Love It: RelationShapes has accolades galore, including the Parents’ Choice Gold Award, Children’s Technology Review Editor’s Choice, Teachers with Apps Best Play & Learn Apps, and SIIA CODIE Awards Finalist. This free app offers two interrelated areas for children to play and replay for visual stimulation. Match It lets children manipulate abstract and figurative shape combinations any way they choose, which improves visual attention. Picture It delights children by stretching their imaginations as they personalize their pictures with accessories and backgrounds that add context and humor on their mobile device.
3. Sleep Sounds by Sleep Pillow
Available for Download On: Apple App Store
Price: Free (In-app purchases available)
Why You’ll Love It: This simple app is highly rated by the Inspired Treehouse for its calming sounds, like white noise, waves, and thunderstorms. The sounds provide a calming auditory experience in the therapy room, classroom, or home. It also has a metronome option to use during sessions for an auditory break.
Best OT Apps for Developing Motor Skills
OTs need powerful solutions to treat those with sensory processing disorders. Those patients need help understanding cause and effect.
4. Fun Bubbles
Available for Download On: Apple App Store (iPhone and iPad only)
Price: $0.99
Why You’ll Love It: This app is ranked highly among iOS apps and excels at helping kids and toddlers develop their spatial reasoning skills and keeping them engaged. The application developer created it for the specific purpose of entertaining and helping his own toddler. Although it has ads, the app has been positively reviewed among adults, who say it's relaxing and fun to play for their special-needs young children and themselves. This cool app is particularly well suited for OTs working with children or adults with anxiety or ADHD.
5. Cookie Doodle
Available for Download On: Apple App Store (iPad only)
Price: $0.99
Why You’ll Love It: Cookie Doodle uses baking to help children hone their motor skills. It helps with sequencing, language skills, creativity, visual tracking, and word and picture association. The app was a Parent’s Choice Foundation award winner and a favorite in Martha Stewart’s magazine. If your younger patients don’t love cookies, there are other baked goods versions, including Cake Doodle, Donut Doodle, and Tie Dye Doodle.
6. Animal Maze
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free
Why You’ll Love It: Children use an iPad to navigate mazes and develop fine motor skills with this finger isolation activity. It is free with zero ads and outstanding for the development of spatial orientation and planning skills. Children 3.5 years and up will have fun while learning. The app was developed by STEP BY STEP, which specializes in apps for children ages one to five years. They give great attention to detail and simplicity, and their apps avoid unnecessary distractions like pop-ups.
Best OT Apps for Handwriting
7. Dexteria
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: $6.99 (Apple App Store) & $4.99 (Google Play)
Why You’ll Love It: Dexteria is a handwriting app that offers children and adults various hand exercises to help develop fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, and handwriting readiness. Using cool animations, graphics, sound effects, and music creates an engaging experience as the user works on honing their handwriting skills. It also helps adults who have suffered some kind of injury to rebuild those skills. Dexteria apps are best used on the larger screen of an iPad or Android tablet.
8. Handwriting Heroes
Available for Download On: Web-based
Price: 1 Adult 1 student $10/month, classroom plan $25/month
Why You’ll Love It: Handwriting Heroes helps kids from preschoolers to second-grade students with playful heroes that teach students how to form their letters and letter recognition. Kids learn from game-based learning through fun animations, catchy tunes, and memorable tales. The app takes a multisensory approach that adapts to each child's learning style and targeted skill area. It is tops among quality apps used by pediatric occupational therapists for handwriting and is used for just 15 minutes of screen time daily.
9. LetterSchool
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free (In-app purchases available)
Why You’ll Love It: This play-and-learn handwriting app is perfect for younger learners and is an excellent assistive technology recommended by teachers and occupational therapists. It has won numerous awards, like the National Parenting Product Award from the NAPPA. Through interactive animations, your patient population will learn block and cursive letters, uppercase and lowercase, numbers 1-10, and CVC and CVCC words.
Best OT Apps for Communication Skills
10. Dragon Anywhere: Dictate Now
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Monthly subscription, $15 | Annual subscription, $150
Why You’ll Love It: Dragon Anywhere is an innovative dictation software that allows users to speak into a microphone and have their words transcribed into a document. This app is particularly useful for clients who can’t easily type on keyboards or who suffer from repetitive stress injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome. Speech recognition has come a long way with the developments in A.I. Dragon Anywhere, based on “Dragon Naturally Speaking” speech recognition technology from Nuance Communications, which is the same technology used for Apple’s Siri. The only downside is that the app requires an internet connection to use it.
11. Constant Therapy
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free (In-app purchases available)
Why You’ll Love It: Constant Therapy is an award-winning speech therapy app for people coping with various speech, language, and cognitive disorders caused by stroke or traumatic brain injuries. The app allows users to develop and hone different skills, including speech, language, cognition, memory, reading, attention, and comprehension, anytime, anywhere. Users can establish goal-setting prompts and personalized tasks and track their progress on their performance dashboards. Clinicians may create customized homework programs for speech, language, and cognitive therapy to keep therapy happening beyond the office setting.
Best OT Apps for Clients’ Self-Care
12. Fabulous — Motivate Me!
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free
Why You’ll Love It: Fabulous — Motivate Me! Encourages users to develop good nutrition, improve sleeping habits, and become more active in their daily activities. It can take between 18 and 254 days to form a new habit, but people tend to stop the process after a few days. This “daily life coach” for routine tasks is a daily planner and tracking app using behavioral science to help build healthy habits. Fabulous has been named Best App Self-Care 2018 on the App Store and a Best App Finalist in the Google Play Awards.
13. Lumosity
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free (In-app purchases available)
Why You’ll Love It: Lumosity is a highly rated “brain-training” app developed by a team of scientists and designers who transformed cognitive and neuropsychological tasks into games and puzzles for all age groups. The games challenge users’ core cognitive skills: memory, attention, processing speed, and problem solving. This perfect app is used by more than 100 million people worldwide and includes over 50 activities for users to try. In the beginning, you’ll be prompted to do a free 10-minute Fit Test, which provides baseline scores for different cognitive skills. Luminosity is designed to work with different brains and adapt to unique strengths and weaknesses. If you buy the full version, you can gain access to curated sets of games based on those scores and the types of skills you’d like to work on. The app can track performance across various activities and provide insights into strengths and weaknesses.
14. Headspace
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free (In-app purchases available)
Why You’ll Love It: Meditation is a proven stress reliever that helps people gain restful sleep and improve their mental health. As a daily habit, practicing mindfulness can foster learning and development with increased focus. Guided meditations, mindfulness exercises, and courses set Headspace apart from other meditation apps. The app offers recommendations from hundreds of exercises based on what the user is feeling. Three-minute meditation sessions are excellent for a quick reset, making it tops among mobile apps.
15. Rehab Coach: CVA Stroke Rehabilitation Recovery
Available for Download On: Google Play
Price: Free
Why You’ll Love It: Designed for patients in rehabilitation for a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), Rehab Coach is specifically designed to treat expressive aphasia. The app uses math exercises, color recognition, facial exercises, alphabet and vowel learning, and memory exercises to help stroke victims recover. It ranks very high among Android apps.
16. iDo Hygiene
Available for Download On: Apple App Store
Price: $9.99 for all modules
Why You’ll Love It: iDo Hygiene teaches personal hygiene for everyone, from young children to older kids. It has 12 self-care tasks specifically designed for individuals with cognitive impairment and autism. Skills include face washing, showering, applying deodorant, using public bathrooms, and toothbrushing. It offers a step-by-step visual guide with videos, task sequences in images, and educational games.
Best OT App for Professional Development
17. MedBridge
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free (Yearly subscription also available)
Why You’ll Love It: MedBridge provides OTs, PTs, athletic trainers, and speech-language pathologists with continuing education to expand their knowledge and improve patient outcomes. The curriculum of this educational app is evidence-based and lets you earn CEUs by watching course videos. To facilitate patient engagement, you can view patient demonstrations. Content is customized and downloadable with full knowledge tracks often assigned by medical organizations.
Best OT Prep App
18. OT Pocket Prep
Available for Download On: Apple App Store | Google Play
Price: Free (In-app purchases available)
Why You’ll Love It: Pocket Prep is an award-winning mobile learning and exam preparation tool specifically geared toward helping you study for the Occupational Therapist Registered (OTR) exam. OT Pocket Prep is an outstanding exam simulator that lets users design customized practice tests. The answers have detailed explanations, so the test taker understands the reasoning behind the question.
Best App for Treatment Beyond the Office
19. Theratrak
Available for Download On: Apple App Store
Price: $39.99/month for sole practitioners, $29.99/month per therapist at small clinics, and $14.99/month per therapist at large clinics, NGOs, and governments
Why You’ll Love It: Multidisciplinary teams expand their collaboration, working together to prescribe, track, and monitor home therapy programs customized for the patient. It takes just a few clicks to create and prescribe custom home programs that participants can easily follow and practice. Individual therapists or entire teams can remotely track the participant’s progress. Theratrak is highly recommended for helping kids with disabilities achieve independence.
Updated by Margarita David, DNP, RN, PCCN, CSN
Image courtesy of iStock.com/monkeybusinessimages