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ASC-Inclusion – a Virtual Environment Teaching Children with ASC to Understand and Express Emotions
Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) experience difficulties communicating their own emotions and recognizing the emotions of others. These difficulties appear in different modalities, including facial expressions, vocal intonation, and body language. Such deficits may hamper the social functioning of children with ASC and increase their exclusion.
Alongside these difficulties, individuals with ASC tend to have intact and sometimes superior abilities to comprehend and manipulate closed, rule-based, predictable systems, such as computerized environments, and may better learn from them than from non-structured settings. Computerized environments can produce simplified versions of the socio-emotional world, reduce sensory stimulation, and support a featured-based learning style of socio-emotional cues, gradually integrating them into a holistic picture. Harnessing these qualities for the sake of emotion recognition and expression training, children with ASC may be more motivated to learn about the emotion world through virtual computerized environments.
Objectives:
To demonstrate the up to date status of the project, as well as a summary of data collected so far for its evaluation.
Methods:
The program is embedded in a virtual world and includes highly engaging elements, aimed at enhancing the child's motivation, including games, animation, video and audio clips, rewards, a child's avatar, and communication with smart agents and peers.
The system combines several state-of-the art technologies in one comprehensive environment, including computerized analysis of users’ gestures, facial and vocal expressions. It is planned to be available for home or school use, and as an aid to therapists.
Caregivers will be offered their own supportive environment, including professional information, reports of child’s progress and use of the system and forums for parents and therapists. Based on the internet, it will allow families from wider and less privileged environments to benefit from professional training.
An iterative process of testing, feedback and evaluation supports the system's development. Panels of children with ASC and their families, and panels of professionals, in the UK, Israel, and Sweden, contribute to ensure content and usability will comply with the users' preferences and needs.
Results:
The current presentation will demonstrate:
- The system at its current stage of development: its virtual world and emotion recognition training in the different modalities, as well as the expression training components, using the above technologies for analysis and feedback on the children's' performance. The environment, tutorials and games presented have been evaluated and approved by our panels of families and professionals.
- Preliminary results of the multi-site RCT, conducted with 120 children in Israel, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Conclusions:
The ASC-Inclusion project offers children with ASC and their families the benefit of state of the art educational technology for enhancement of their socio-emotional communication repertoire. A multi-site randomized controlled trial is in process and preliminary results are being analyzed.