A step towards virtual reality based social communication for children with Autism

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by deficits in socialization, communication and imagination. In recent years several assistive technologies e.g., Virtual Reality (VR) are being investigated to promote social communication skills in these children. However these only report on performance and do not use physiological markers as predictors of one's affective states. In conventional techniques, a therapist adjusts the intervention paradigm by monitoring the affective states of these children. However, these children often demonstrate inability to explicitly express their affective states thereby inducing limitations on conventional techniques. Physiological signals being continuously available and not directly impacted by these communication difficulties can be used as markers of one's affective states. In India, research on technology-assisted intervention for children with ASD is rare. Here, the presented work seeks to address the challenge of maintaining the subtle Indian social aspects which still remains untouched in research, but are valuable contributors to social communication while developing VR based social conversation system. Additionally, we acquired physiological markers and correlated these with the affective state having implication on one's performance. A preliminary usability study indicates the potential of the system to improve social task performance and to induce variations in one's physiological markers. © 2013 IEEE.