Collaborative Strategies in Multitouch Tabletop to Encourage Social Interaction in People with Autism

Mazi

“…TUIs have been deployed in SEN settings to support learning skills and for health and wellbeing benefits [8,5,22,18,15,16,25,37]. Kientz [21,18,17] or tablets [19,10]. Most recently Zhiglova [20] presented an interactive textile carpet concept to support storytelling through the use of detachable soft fabric shaped characters, and speculates on the potential social benefit that such carpets could have for children with high support needs.…”

“…As explained by Hornecker et al [11] central to the notion of shareability is the concept of entry and access points, where the former "invite and entice people into engagement" and the latter enables "users to join a group's activity, allowing perceptual and manipulative access and fluidity of sharing" [Ibid]. However, despite the potential benefit of TUIs for supporting play and communication [17] recent studies on functional social skills development target children with low support needs and Asperger and are particularly focused on VR, AR, robots and computer vision [37,36,41]. As children with autism, especially those in the lower end of the spectrum, have difficulty with abstraction of thoughts, we explore in this paper how physical interaction might enhance the possibility of sharing positive experiences between children.…”