Cognitive rehabilitation for autism children mental status observation using virtual reality based interactive environment

Abstract

Proposed Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy is to observe autism children mental status using virtual reality based interactive environment. Interactive environment is designed to analyze three levels of cognitive impairment decreasing functioning such as attention, reasoning, emotion, social behavior, decision making and language understanding. All the three levels were designed for mild autism children to have virtual walk through using HMD (Head Mount Device). We modeled a house and the behavior of the autism children were analyzed with day to day activities with the simple query to observe children language understanding. Observing the 5 autism children (3 boys and 2 girls in the age between 7 to 11) with the support of therapist gives promising improvement over the behavior in the virtual interactive environment and enhance their cognitive rehabilitation. Each level the therapist repeat the level, wherever children not responding. Observation results gives the children interact with virtual world with happy and positive emotions. In all the levels we incorporated children native language (Tamil Language) for the instruction, query and appreciation while they interact well. In future it is proposed to track their face, eye ball movement and predict the mental status of the children in detail to improve their overall mental status of autism children.