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Alexism: ALEXa supporting children with autISM in their oral care at home

Published: 06 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Oral health care can be a challenging experience for children with autism, for their parents and for dentists. Recently, some technology-enhanced systems have been proposed to help people with autism to cope with distressing situations originated by unknown social-life contexts, such as dental care settings with intense sound-visual stimulations. Results were positive in mitigating anxiety at the dental clinic but seem to fail in supporting proper oral hygiene at home. Thanks to the increasing spread of household Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) and Vocal Conversational Agents (VCAs), we envisage new opportunities considering the Voice-enabled IPAs not only as support on daily activities but also to enrich and simplify access to healthcare procedures from home. This work attempts to extend the use of technology-enhanced systems for dental care by exploiting the potential of the Vocal User Interface, Amazon Alexa, as an instructional agent with children on the spectrum. To this purpose, we developed a personalized Alexa Skill with two different functionalities: (i) support the child during the routine transition toward the target activity: move to the bathroom to brush their teeth; (ii) act as a persuader and a timer to guide the child during the procedure observing the proper brushing time. We conducted a three-week preliminary study with three children of different autistic profiles. The goal was to collect opportunities and issues deriving from the device introduction in the home context and test the device usage to favour dental care. Results and feedback were encouraging and gave insights to improve this approach.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Unlock Life with a Chat(GPT): Integrating Conversational AI with Large Language Models into Everyday Lives of Autistic IndividualsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641989(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Artificial Intelligence in Education – Pedagogical ReflectionsПедагогически форум10.15547/PF.2023.02411:4(25-32)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Embodied technologies for stress management in children: A systematic review2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309473(1420-1427)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AVI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
June 2022
414 pages
ISBN:9781450397193
DOI:10.1145/3531073
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 06 June 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Amazon Alexa
  2. Autism spectrum disorder
  3. Intelligent Personal Assistants
  4. dental care
  5. personalization
  6. vocal user interface

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AVI 2022

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Overall Acceptance Rate 128 of 490 submissions, 26%

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View all
  • (2024)Unlock Life with a Chat(GPT): Integrating Conversational AI with Large Language Models into Everyday Lives of Autistic IndividualsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641989(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Artificial Intelligence in Education – Pedagogical ReflectionsПедагогически форум10.15547/PF.2023.02411:4(25-32)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Embodied technologies for stress management in children: A systematic review2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309473(1420-1427)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Brush Up with AR: Supporting Children’s Enjoyable Tooth-brushing through Augmented Reality Feedback2023 14th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC)10.1109/ICTC58733.2023.10393125(1712-1717)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023

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