Tailored Immersive Environments: Advancing Neurodivergent Support Through Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper presents a virtual reality system tailored for neurodivergent individuals, enabling personalized practice of daily tasks to improve their skills, with an evaluation demonstrating diverse scenario generation and feature variance within difficulty levels.

Contribution

The study introduces an automatic personalization method for virtual environments tailored to individual abilities and training needs of neurodivergent users.

Findings

The system can generate numerous scenarios across different difficulty levels.

Within the same difficulty, feature variance is significant for individual profiles.

Evaluation on synthetic profiles confirms the method's effectiveness.

Abstract

Every day life tasks can present significant challenges for neurodivergent individuals, particularly those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) who are characterized by specific sensitivities. This contribution describes a virtual reality system that allows neurodivergent individuals to experience everyday situations in order to practice and implement strategies for overcoming their daily challenges. The key strength of the proposed system is the automatic personalization of the virtual environment, based on both the individual's abilities and their specific training needs. The proposed method has been evaluated on four synthetic user profiles, also proposing a metric able to evaluate the variance of the features within the same difficulty level. The results show that the method can produce a significant number of scenarios for the various difficulty levels. Furthermore, within the same difficulty, there is a wide variance of the non-constrained features for the specific profile.