Autiverse: Eliciting Autistic Adolescents' Daily Narratives through AI-guided Multimodal Journaling
This addresses the problem of text-centric and high-executive-functioning barriers in journaling for autistic adolescents, offering a tailored technological solution to support their narrative development and family communication.
The researchers tackled the challenge of helping autistic adolescents improve narrative skills through journaling by developing Autiverse, an AI-guided multimodal journaling app that uses conversational prompts and visual supports to scaffold storytelling. In a two-week study with 10 autistic adolescent-parent dyads, the app helped construct coherent narratives, enabled parents to learn more about their child's experiences, and fostered enjoyment and agency.
Journaling can potentially serve as an effective method for autistic adolescents to improve narrative skills. However, its text-centric nature and high executive functioning demands present barriers to practice. We present Autiverse, an AI-guided multimodal journaling app for tablets that scaffolds storytelling through conversational prompts and visual supports. Autiverse elicits key details through a stepwise dialogue with peer-like, customizable AI and composes them into an editable four-panel comic strip. Through a two-week deployment study with 10 autistic adolescent-parent dyads, we examine how Autiverse supports autistic adolescents to organize their daily experience and emotion. Autiverse helped them construct coherent narratives, while enabling parents to learn additional details of their child's events and emotions. The customized AI peer created a comfortable space for sharing, fostering enjoyment and a strong sense of agency. We discuss the implications of designing technologies that complement autistic adolescents' strengths while ensuring their autonomy and safety in sharing experiences.