Poster: Design of Mixed Reality Dangerous Situations for Autistic Children: Road Safety

Abstract

While many road safety programs have been instituted over the past decades, bringing down the rate of injury for children from 3.6 deaths per 100,000 to.3, still, every year in the United States, approximately 600 child pedestrians are killed and 76,000 child pedestrians are injured. Children on the autistic spectrum often require additional considerations than neuro-typical children when trying to teach road safety skills, including differences in thinking flexibility, difficulty in understanding social contexts and communication, and over-sensitivity or under-sensitivity to sights and sounds. A mixed reality road safety environment design is proposed to address several considerations, with potential technical and clinical design challenges.