OREANDA-NEWS. March 03, 2011. Fujitsu today announced that it has been awarded with Germany's universal design award 2011, for its mobile phone application that provides educational and social support for children with special needs, including those with learning disabilities and autism.

The universal design award is an international design prize awarded by the Germany-based universal design association (universal design e.V.) and its business affiliate, universal design Ltd. (universal design GmbH).

This is the third universal design prize won by Fujitsu, following its 2008 award for "Fujitsu Accessibility Assistance" and 2009 award for "ColorAttendant."

The award-winning Mobile Phone Application to Support Children with Special Needs ("Timer," "Picture Card," and "Handwriting") is a mobile phone application providing educational and social support to children with special needs, as well as their guardians and mentors.

This application was developed by Fujitsu and tested in collaboration with Kagawa University's Faculty of Education (Sakai Lab), which is actively involved in employing ICT in education and support applications. Fujitsu performed field testing on the software from May to September 2010 to verify its effectiveness in providing educational and social support, and after improving the application's functionality and user-friendliness, it has been available to the public free of charge since October 2010. It has been downloaded approximately 20,000 times in the four months since its release.

Fujitsu has long been working on universal design initiatives that seek to enable broad accessibility to the world of information and communications technologies (ICT), and the company will continue to research and develop ICT applications that benefit children with special needs.