AutiHero: Leveraging Generative AI in Social Narratives to Engage Parents in Story-Driven Behavioral Guidance for Autistic Children
This addresses the problem of time-consuming customization of behavioral guidance materials for parents of autistic children, offering a practical tool to support social learning, though it is incremental in applying existing AI methods to this domain.
The researchers tackled the challenge of creating personalized social narratives for autistic children by developing AutiHero, a generative AI system that helps parents customize stories based on their child's interests and behaviors, resulting in high engagement with parents creating 218 stories over two weeks and reading an average of 4.25 stories daily.
Social narratives are known to help autistic children understand and navigate social situations through stories. To ensure effectiveness, however, the materials need to be customized to reflect each child's unique behavioral context, requiring considerable time and effort for parents to practice at home. We present AutiHero, a generative AI-based social narrative system for behavioral guidance, which supports parents to create personalized stories for their autistic children and read them together. AutiHero generates text and visual illustrations that reflect their children's interests, target behaviors, and everyday contexts. In a two-week deployment study with 16 autistic child-parent dyads, parents created 218 stories and read an average of 4.25 stories per day, demonstrating a high level of engagement. AutiHero also provided an effective, low-demanding means to guide children's social behaviors, encouraging positive change. We discuss the implications of generative AI-infused tools to empower parents in guiding their children's behaviors, fostering their social learning.