Designing a Holistic At-Home Learning Aid for Autism
This addresses the need for more integrated and personalized at-home learning tools for children with autism and their families, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing technology with a focus on context and co-design.
The paper tackles the problem of digital behavioral aids for autism being disconnected from real-world contexts by designing a wearable expression recognition system integrated into daily family interactions, aiming to provide a holistic therapy framework tailored to specific needs through co-design with children and caregivers.
In recent years, much focus has been put on employing technology to make novel behavioural aids for those with autism. Most of these are digital adaptations of tools used in standard behavioural therapy to enforce normative skills. These digital counterparts are often used outside of both the larger therapeutic context and the real world, in which the learned skills might apply. To address this, we are designing a system of automatic expression recognition on wearable devices that integrates directly into the families daily social interactions, to give children and their caregivers the tools and information they need to design their own holistic therapy. In order to develop a tool that will be truly useful to families, we proactively include children with autism and their families as co-designers in the development process. By providing an app and interface with interchangeable social feedback options, we aim to produce a framework for therapy that folds into their daily lives, tailored to their specific needs.