Portable Joint Attention Skill Training Platform for Children With Autism

Children with autism are characterized by milestones in joint attention (JA) skill. They fail to understand the directional cue issued by a partner (during social communication), which often results in them reciprocating inappropriately and not completing the JA bid successfully. The directional cues can be gaze-pointing, finger-pointing, etc., toward a target object of interest. Here, in this article, we present a TABlet-based Joint Attention Task (TABJAT) platform that can present JA tasks on a tablet with virtual characters (serving the role of JA administrator), delivering prompting cues (e.g., gaze-pointing, finger-pointing, and head orientation) and virtual objects offering sparkling cue. The platform is adaptive to one's JA skill (while autonomously offering JA tasks with gradually decreasing cueing prompt information, i.e., increasing the task difficulty). This can offer an opportunity for a child to interact with the JA tasks by himself/herself (preserving the triadic interaction regime of JA tasks) and learn the skill while being at home and/or school. Results of a study with 18 children with autism indicate the feasibility of TABJAT to be accepted by the target group, and quantify their JA skill in an individualized manner in terms of their task performance while adaptively offering the JA tasks of varying difficulty.