LouAnne Boyd
ABSTRACT
Many autistic children can have difficulty communicating, understanding others, and interacting with new and unfamiliar environments. At times they may suffer from a meltdown. The major contributing factor to meltdowns is sensory overwhelm. Technological solutions have shown promise in improving the quality of life for autistic children-however little exists to manage meltdowns. In this work with stakeholders, we design and deploy a low cost, mobile VR application to provide relief during sensory discomfort. Through the analysis of surveys from 88 stakeholders from a variety of groups (i.e., autistic adults, children with autism, parents of autistic individuals, and medical practitioners), we identified three key features regarding ways to manage meltdowns: escape, distract, and wait it out. These insights were implementation in a system, then was then remotely deployed with 6 families. Findings and future steps are discussed.
Supplemental Material
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- Mirko Gelsomini, Franca Garzotto, Vito Matarazzo, Nicolò Messina, and Daniele Occhiuto. 2017. Creating Social Stories as Wearable Hyper-Immersive Virtual Reality Experiences for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 431–437. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3078072.3084305Google ScholarDigital Library
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- Kathryn E. Ringland, Christine T. Wolf, Lynn Dombrowski, and Gillian R. Hayes. 2015. Making “Safe”: Community-Centered Practices in a Virtual World Dedicated to Children with Autism. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, ACM, Vancouver BC Canada, 1788–1800. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675216Google Scholar
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- Ben Wasserman, Derek Prate, Bryce Purnell, Alex Muse, Kaitlyn Abdo, Kendra Day, and LouAnne Boyd. 2019. vrSensory: Designing Inclusive Virtual Games with Neurodiverse Children. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts, ACM, Barcelona Spain, 755–761. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3341215.3356277Google ScholarDigital Library
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