Design and application of an immersive virtual reality system to enhance emotional skills for children with autism spectrum disorders

This paper proposes the design and application of an immersive virtual reality system to improve and train the emotional skills of students with autism spectrum disorders. It has been designed for primary school students between the ages of 7–12 and all participants have a confirmed diagnosis of aut...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers and education 2016-07, Vol.98, p.192-205
Main Authors: Lorenzo, Gonzalo, Lledó, Asunción, Pomares, Jorge, Roig, Rosabel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Autism
Autism spectrum disorders
Children
Computer vision
Design engineering
Disorders
Emotional skills
Immersive virtual reality
Skills
Social skills
Students
Virtual reality
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Summary:This paper proposes the design and application of an immersive virtual reality system to improve and train the emotional skills of students with autism spectrum disorders. It has been designed for primary school students between the ages of 7–12 and all participants have a confirmed diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. The immersive environment allows the student to train and develop different social situations in a structured, visual and continuous manner. The use of a computer vision system to automatically determine the child's emotional state is proposed. This system has been created with two goals in mind, the first to update the social situations, with the student's emotional mood taken into account, and the second to confirm, automatically, if the child's behavior is appropriate in the represented social situation. The results described in this paper show a significant improvement in the children's emotional competences, in comparison with the results obtained until now using earlier virtual reality systems. •Virtual reality to improve the emotional skills of ASD students.•Immersive virtual reality system to create social situations where the students can practice their emotional responses.•Design and implementation of protocols to evaluate the students' emotional response.•Identify, develop and train appropriate emotional behaviors of ASD students.•Immersive virtual reality system to create social situations to improve their emotional skills.
ISSN:0360-1315
1873-782X
DOI:10.1016/j.compedu.2016.03.018