Therapy Oriented Garden Monitoring System Gardening for Autistic Children

Abstract

An increasing number of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is linked to blend in problems like anxiety and depression, is known that visual aids make it immediately clear that electronic media can and are there to help the autistic child. This work proposes a system that helps to reduce the levels of anxiety in children with autism, since it is difficult for children to understand an instruction given by an adult and by nature such children have a better visual understanding; Due to this, their cognitive process is stimulated by colors and images, responding to the what, how, when and how long of the instruction, this system aims to help autistic children by making use of these elements, since assigning them the task of caring an orchard considerably lowers their anxiety levels, because it is a task that can be structured, thus helping children attend scheduled activities and thus reduce their anxiety, the system receives information on humidity, temperature and sunlight from different digital electronic sensors placed in the orchard, this information is constantly acquired and is obtained from the orchard, it is sent by an electronic system to the internet cloud, to later notify the child through an software on a computer or a tablet if the garden needs to be cared for by the autistic child, the data coming from the garden is to show them in a friendly and striking way, in this way the child's attention is captured, either to be irrigated by water, or to have excess of it, with these actions, the child autistic develops an understanding regarding a given instruction. Tests were carried out with the system in a period of time in a child with (ASD), in this way it was verified that this helps significantly to reduce the levels of anxiety and depression of the autistic child.