An inclusive design approach for developing video games for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The efficacy of therapeutic treatments for Autism Spectrum Disorder is mainly associated with the treatment's intensity in terms of weekly hours. This has led mental health professionals to explore the use of video games to complement traditional treatments. However, major weaknesses have been found due to poor game design, which has failed to fulfill therapeutic objectives or to properly engage children. These weaknesses are typically characterized by the poor integration of knowledge from mental health experts, children's interests and designers' expertise. Starting from this necessity, we propose an inclusive design approach to develop therapeutic games. The method presents strategies to integrate the expertise of clinicians, contributions of children and experience of designers through a set of elicitation and merging techniques. The goal of this method is to design games that are effective in terms of therapeutic objectives and that are enjoyable for children. To describe this method, we present its application in the design and development of a Kinect-based game for high-functioning children with ASD called “Pico's Adventures”. This game aims at promoting social initiation in young children with autism. Findings from a first exploratory study with 10 children with ASD showed the effectiveness of the game in eliciting social initiation behaviors. This provides a first validation of the method. An essential aspect of the game's success was the use of elements and mechanics that were appealing for the children. As a result, we have identified effective design concepts and paths for further research on games for children with ASD.     

Physiology-based affect recognition for computer-assisted intervention of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Generally, an experienced therapist continuously monitors the affective cues of the children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and adjusts the course of the intervention accordingly. In this work, we address the problem of how to make the computer-based ASD intervention tools affect-sensitive by designing therapist-like affective models of the children with ASD based on their physiological responses. Two computer-based cognitive tasks are designed to elicit the affective states of liking, anxiety, and engagement that are considered important in autism intervention. A large set of physiological indices are investigated that may correlate with the above affective states of children with ASD. In order to have reliable reference points to link the physiological data to the affective states, the subjective reports of the affective states from a therapist, a parent, and the child himself/herself were collected and analyzed. A support vector machines (SVM)-based affective model yields reliable prediction with approximately 82.9% success when using the therapist's reports. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the affective states of children with ASD have been experimentally detected via physiology-based affect recognition technique.     

Key factors mediating the use of a mobile technology tool designed to develop social and life skills in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Of late there has been growing interest in the potential of technology to support children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with social and life skills. There has also been a burgeoning interest in the potential use of mobile technology in the classroom and in the use of such technology to support children with ASD. Building on these developments, the HANDS project has developed a mobile cognitive support application for smartphones, based on the principles of persuasive technology design, which supports children with ASD with social and life skills functioning - areas of ability which tend to be impaired in this population. The software application has been piloted in four special schools for children with ASD. This paper reports on a qualitative interpretivist evaluation, which explores which factors may mediate how the software application is incorporated in to existing practice and what influence it has on practice. Kairos is identified as a key factor, which is associated with the teachers’ view of the software application as extending their reach beyond the classroom. Design guidelines are proposed for future implementations of similarly purposed technology tools.     

Designing for human use: Examples of kitchen interiors for persons with disability and elderly people

Around 15% of the global population has a moderate or severe disability. For this reason, a design where the needs of elderly and disabled population are included, should become more common practise and should not be limited only to medical and rehabilitation products. In this study, the inclusive design practices related to the kitchens were applied. All the important stages in a design process, such as market research, planning, concept designing, detailed designing, research (ergonomic assessment), and production preparation were completed. In market research we market research examined the preferences of 216 respondents. Sixty percent of them were either elderly and/or disabled persons (direct users), 40% were caretakers, physiotherapists, and managers of care centres (indirect users). Implementation of obtained results is three kitchen lines with assistive technology solutions, which are the response to the requirements identified as appropriate in meeting the needs of the elderly and disabled kitchen users. The main conclusion of the article is the statement that the needs of seniors can and should be efficiently included in a design process of home interiors. It can be recognised as an important “social” designing criterion which can constitute a good basis for going beyond the traditional design and going toward the sustainable design.     

The identification,implementation, and evaluation of critical user interface design features of computer-assisted instruction programs in mathematics for students with learning disabilities

Critical user interface design features of computer-assisted instruction programs in mathematics for students with learning disabilities and corresponding implementation guidelines were identified in this study. Based on the identified features and guidelines, a multimedia computer-assisted instruction program, ‘Math Explorer’, which delivers addition and subtraction word problem-solving instruction for students with learning disabilities at the early elementary level, was designed and developed. Lastly, usability testing was conducted to assess whether Math Explorer was well-designed in terms of the interface for students with learning disabilities. Given the results of the usability testing, this study corroborated the fact that the critical user interface design features and guidelines in mathematics computer-assisted instruction programs would be essential for facilitating the mathematical learning of students with learning disabilities. Implications for practice and future research were discussed.     

Audio-augmented paper for therapy and educational intervention for children with autistic spectrum disorder

Autism affects children׳s learning and social development. Commonly used rehabilitative treatments are aimed at stimulating the social skills of children with autism. In this article, we present a prototype and a pilot study on an audio-augmented paper to support the therapy of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The prototype supports audio recording with standard sheets of paper by using tangible tools that can be shared between the therapist and the child. The prototype is a tool for the therapist to engage the child in a storytelling activity. We use a progressive design method based on a dynamic process that merges concept generation, technology benchmarking and activity design into continuously enriching actions. The paper highlights the qualities and benefits of using tangible audio-augmented artefacts for therapy and educational intervention for children with ASD. The work describes three main qualities of our prototype: from building cooperation to attention control, flow control, and using the children׳s own voices to foster attention.     

Examples of density, orientation, and shape-optimal 2D-design for stiffness and/or strength with orthotropic materials

The balance between stiffness and strength design is considered in the present paper. For materials with different levels of orthotropy (including isotropy), we optimize the density distribution as well as the orientational distribution for a short cantilever problem, and discuss the tendencies in design and response (energy distributions and stress directions). For a hole in a biaxial stress field, the shape design of the boundary hole is also incorporated.The resulting tapered density distributions may be difficult to manufacture, for example, in micro-mechanics production. For such problems a penalization approach to obtain black and white designs, i.e. uniform material or holes, is often applied in optimal design. A specific example is studied to show the effect of the penalization, but is restricted here to an isotropic material.When the total amount of material is not specified, a conflict between optimal design for stiffness and optimal design for strength appears. The computational results of such a case study are shown.