Exploring motion-based touchless games for autistic children's learning

Abstract

Our understanding of the effectiveness of motion-based touchless games for autistic children is limited, because of the small amount of empirical studies and the limits of our current knowledge on autism. This paper offers two contributions. First, we provide a survey and a discussion of the existing literature. Second, we describe a field study that extends the current body of empirical evidence of the potential benefits of touchless motion-based gaming for autistic children. Our research involved five autistic children and one therapist in the experimentation of a set of Kinect games at a therapeutic center for a period of two and a half months. Using standardized therapeutic tests, observations during game sessions, and video analysis of over 20 hours of children’s activities, we evaluated the learning benefits in relationship to attentional skills and explored several factors in the emotional and behavioral sphere. Our findings show improvements of the considered learning variables and help us to better understand how autistic children experience motion-based touchless play. Overall, our research sheds a light on the opportunities offered full body touchless games for therapy and education of these special users

Technology-Facilitated Diagnosis and Treatment of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Engineering Perspective

“…In recent years, motion-based touchless serious games can be played using game consoles (selected from commercial games appropriate for children with ASD) [22][23][24], or via computer systems [25]. Different from traditional serious games, this type of games engage the full body movements of the participants.…”

“…Enabled by inexpensive depth sensing devices such as Microsoft Kinect, it becomes possible to engage children with ASD with motion-based touchless serious games [22,23,25,134]. Unlike other serious games, a participant engages in the game play by moving his enter body.…”

“…Many autism studies that have been published in clinical journals included video coding, such as [22,38,64,102].…”

“…In motion-based touchless serious games [22,25], a therapist was also tasked to observe the behaviors of participant and to intervene when necessary.…”

“…To assess the effectiveness of using motion-based touchless serious games to improve autistic children's learning, two variables, namely selective attention ( i.e., how well a participant could focus on an important stimulus in the presence of distractions) and sustained attention ( i.e., how well a participant could hold his/her attention to complete a task), were measured and compared using the Bell Test at the beginning, during, and seven days after the end of the treatment [22]. Data for the two variables were extracted from the recorded videos taken during the game plays.…”