It is essential to get disabled people involved and connected to each other and to the rest of the society. Games can be used for this purpose as well as encouraging them to be active physically. However, many of the current interactive games interact with users through voice commands which could be a problem for the deaf/mute people. Microsoft Kinect opens a new aspect for the gaming industry. This hardware can interact with players through a 3D vision and sound detector. This means players can use their body movements as well as their voice commands to control the game environment. The aim of this paper is to develop a Kinect gesture-based game suitable for deaf/mute people. The Microsoft Kinect SDK for Windows is used to develop a game which recognize the gesture command and convert the sign to the text commands in the game (in this instance Microsoft Shape game). Therefore, the deaf/mute player can enjoy taking part in this interactive game. Conclusions are drawn on how researchers can adapt and develop the new game environment which is understandable and compatible with deaf/mute peoples' abilities.

The majority of children with autism face difficulties in social interaction and communication skills. Consequently, in this paper we present a pilot study in which we explored the usability of Sphero as a rehabilitation tool for developing social and communication skills. We designed an interactive scenario where children with autism should verbally control the robot and utter voice commands. Our observations show that the children were very interested to interact with the robot in the given framework. They showed surprising behaviors that are promising evidences of effectiveness of using Sphero in rehabilitation of social and communication deficits.

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