Soft-brush: A novel tendon driven tactile stimulator for affective touch in children with autism

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is a prevalent developmental disorder and is associated with high familial and societal cost. Early interventions during the first year can have the best developmental outcomes despite the fact that the earliest diagnosis of ASD is only possible by the age of two. Investigating brain response to basic stimuli like sight, smell and touch has proved to have the potential to find markers between individuals with ASD and their neurotypical peers during infancy. Since existing tactile stimulus delivering method tend to suffer from low accuracy, low availability and low tolerability, it is necessary to develop a precise, high-tolerable tactile stimulus delivering mechanism. The present study examined the feasibility and tolerability of Soft-Brush, a comfortable, mobile silicone tactile stimulator with tendon-driven mechanism, for delivering tactile stimulus in multisensory studies. Experiments have shown that Soft-Brush has high tolerance rate by the children during experiments resulting in reliable data collection.