The use of augmented reality in the diagnosis and treatment of autistic children: a review and a new system

This paper consists of two parts. The first presents a review of the literature on the use of augmented reality (AR) in the diagnosis and treatment of autistic children with a particular focus on the efficacy of AR in assisting autistic children who have communicative, social, sentiment, and attention deficit disorders. The review also investigated interactions between AR systems and children, taking into consideration the target behaviors that are selected from the child during treatment. Such modes were fully explored by taking into account the needs of the individual child in terms of achieving an improvement in their condition. Most significantly, the empirical information that was obtained from the reviewed works was evaluated according to some specific targeted attitudes and how each AR solution was utilized during treatment to achieve the fostering of such attitudes in order to identify the requirements for building an effective AR system. In addition, the review revealed the essential design features that can enable AR systems to achieve a high level of effectiveness in autism therapy. The review also covered the instruction that AR systems were noticed to execute, and focused on the significant characteristics that allow AR systems to accomplish degrees of efficacy in autism treatment. The review ends by classifying the various AR systems based on different criteria. The second part of the paper focuses on our new AR system as a case study. It covers the design considerations and decisions as well as the key features and appearance of the system. The paper concludes by making some recommendations for the further development of an AR system for application in the domain of child autism.