Design of an Intelligent and Immersive System to Facilitate the Social Interaction Between Caregivers and Young Children with Autism

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have core deficits in social interaction skills. Intelligent technological systems have been developed to help children with ASD develop their social interaction skills, like response to name (RTN), response to joint attention (RJA), initiation of joint attention (IJA) and imitation skills. Most existing systems entail human-computer interaction (HCI) or human-robot interaction (HRI), in which participants interact with the systems to elicit certain social behaviors or practice certain social skills. However, because the robot/computer being the only therapeutic factor in HRI/HCI systems, this may result in the isolation effect. Therefore, in this work, an intelligent and immersive computer system is proposed for caregivers and their young children with ASD to interact with each other and help develop social skills (RTN and IJA). In this computer assisted HHI setting, caregivers deliver social cues to participants (young children with ASD) and give a decision-making signal to the system. The system also provides different non-social cues, to help caregivers to elicit and reinforce the social behaviors of participants. By including a caregiver in the loop, we hope to ameliorate the isolation effect by creating a more real-world HHI scenario. In this paper, we will show the feasibility of the proposed system and validate its potential effectiveness by both subjective measurements and objective measurements.