Designing a Holistic At-Home Learning Aid for Autism

TL;DR

This paper presents a wearable-based system for autism therapy that integrates into daily family interactions, involving co-design with children and caregivers to create personalized, holistic support tools.

Contribution

It introduces a co-designed, wearable-based platform that seamlessly integrates autism therapy into daily social interactions for families.

Findings

Developed a wearable expression recognition system

Created a customizable app with social feedback options

Proposed a framework for personalized, daily-life therapy

Abstract

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.