eXtended Reality for Autism Interventions: The importance of Mediation and Sensory-Based Approaches
This work addresses the disconnect between XR research and real-world autism interventions, offering practical guidelines for practitioners, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge without new experimental results.
The study compared eXtended Reality (XR) autism research with stakeholder needs from 34 practitioners to identify gaps, proposing collaborative XR sensory-based and mediation approaches to benefit the entire autism spectrum and emphasizing the importance of intervention context in design.
eXtended Reality (XR) autism research, ranging from Augmented Reality to Virtual Reality, focuses on socio-emotional abilities and high-functioning autism. However common autism interventions address the entire spectrum over social, sensory and mediation issues. To bridge the gap between autism research and real interventions, we compared existing literature on XR and autism with stakeholders' needs obtained by interviewing 34 skateholders, mainly practitioners. It allow us first to suggest XR use cases that could better support practitioners' interventions, and second to derive design guidelines accordingly. Findings demonstrate that collaborative XR sensory-based and mediation approaches would benefit the entire spectrum, and encourage to consider the overall intervention context when designing XR protocols.