Applications of Virtual Reality for Autism Inclusion. A review

Abstract

Children withAutism Spectrum Disorder present several difficulties in social interaction, communication obstacles and restricted and repeated behaviors. Social connection with others is typically challenging for them, and they are frequently unsure of how to react to other people’s emotions, facial expressions, and movements of their body, and especially of how to respond to various social circumstances. Recent review studies regardingVR for children with ASD have found that most of the relevant interventions aimed at improving social and emotional skills, as well as common activities of everyday life. In this work, we are going to present studies of the most current applications ofVR technologies to the education of students with ASD with the aim to gain an updated overview of the use ofVR in this field.A thorough search was conducted in Scopus and Pubmed databases, as well as through Google Scholar, using the keywords ‘Virtual Reality’, ‘Autism Spectrum Disorder’, ‘application’,‘intervention’,‘students’,‘education’ and their combinations, for the period 2015–2021. Our search was limited to studies presented in English.A total of eight (8) studies met the inclusion criteria.The majority of the results we described were positive and quite encouraging, as the deficits in these domains are life- determining for individuals with ASD. Given that many barriers (e.g., regarding cost and comfort issues) to using theVR technologies have been overcome, more effort should be put to the production of wider and more robust experimental research in the specific field, as well as to the testing of generalizability issues in real life.