“Tell your day”: Developing multimodal interaction applications for children with ASD

Abstract

The development of applications for children, and particularly for those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), is a challenging task. In this context, careful consideration of the characteristics of these users, along with those of different stakeholders, such as parents and teachers, is essential. Also, it is important to provide different ways of using applications through multimodal interaction, in order to adapt, as much as possible, to the users’ needs, capabilities and preferences. Providing multimodality does not mean that users will interact multimodally, but provides freedom of choice to the user. Additionally, enabling multiple forms of interaction might also help understanding what actually works better, for an audience that is not always able to express an opinion regarding what might work. In this article, we take on previous work regarding the definition of a Persona for a child diagnosed with ASD and, considering the goals above, propose and evaluate a first prototype of an application targeting the audience represented by this Persona. This application, aims to serve as a place for communication and information exchange among the child, her family, and teachers and supports multimodal interaction.