Design of a Virtual Reality Based Adaptive Response Technology for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Impairments in social communication skills are thought to be core deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In recent years, several assistive technologies, particularly Virtual Reality (VR), have been investigated to promote social interactions in this population. It is well-known that these children demonstrate atypical viewing patterns during social interactions and thus monitoring eye-gaze can be valuable to design intervention strategies. However, presently available VR-based systems are designed to chain learning via aspects of one’s performance only permitting limited degree of individualization. Given the promise of VR-based social interaction and the usefulness of monitoring eye-gaze in real-time, a novel VR-based dynamic eye-tracking system is developed in this work. The developed system was tested through a small usability study with four adolescents with ASD. The results indicate the potential of the system to promote improved social task performance along with socially-appropriate mechanisms during VR-based social conversation tasks.