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Our research aims at supporting existing therapies for children with intellectual and developmental disorders (IDD). The personal and social autonomy is the desired end state to be achieved to enable a smooth integration in the real world. We developed and tested a framework for storytelling and learning activities that exploits an immersive virtual reality viewer to interact with target users. We co-designed our system with experts from the medical sector, identifying features that allow patients to stay focused on exercises to perform. Our approach triggers a learning process for a seamless assimilation of common behavioral skills useful in every day's life. This paper highlights the technologic challenges in healthcare and discusses cutting-edge interaction paradigms.

Our research aims at exploiting the advances in conversational technology to support people with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). NDD is a group of conditions that are characterized by severe deficits in the cognitive, emotional and motor areas and produce severe impairments in communication and social functioning. This paper presents the design, technology and exploratory evaluation of Emoty, a spoken Conversational Agent (CA) created specifically for individuals with NDD. The goal of Emoty is to help these persons enhancing communication abilities related to emotional recognition and expression, which are fundamental in any form of human relationship. The system exploits emotion detection capabilities based on the semantics of the speech by calling the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer API and from the harmonic features of the audio thanks to an "all-of-us" Deep Learning model. The design and evaluation of Emoty are based on the close collaboration among computer engineers and specialists in NDD

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