Clothing design solutions for children with developmental disabilities: A scoping review protocol.

Children with Developmental Disabilities (DD) often face significant challenges in performing dressing task, fundamental activities of daily living. Inability to accomplish this task independently significantly impacts participation in social and recreational activities, affecting Quality of Life (QoL). Additionally, burden on caregivers increases which in turn leads to stress and burnout. Addressing dressing-related challenges through innovative clothing designs enhances self-independence, alleviate caregiver burden, and improve QoL. However, studies published in this focused area are quite heterogeneous resulting in lack of comprehensive understanding of different clothing solutions that exist for children with DD. Therefore, this scoping review is undertaken to map clothing design solutions available for children with DD between 0 and 18 years. Arksey and O'Malley's framework will be followed, database-specific search strategy and grey literature searches will be conducted to retrieve articles published in English from January 2000 to May 2024. All selected articles will be screened independently by two reviewers, and data will be extracted. The purpose of this scoping review is to map clothing design solutions available for children with DD from scientific literature. Adaptive clothing being an emerging area, evidence from this study may encourage designers to bring innovation in clothing industry for a wider range of disabilities.