Collaborative Virtual Environment to Encourage Teamwork in Autistic Adults in Workplace Settings

AUTHORS

Amat Ashwaq Zaini , Breen Michael , Hunt Spencer , Wilson Devon , Khaliq Yousaf , Byrnes Nathan , Cox Daniel J , Czarnecki Steven , Justice Cameron L , Kennedy Deven A , Lotivio Tristan C , McGee Hunter K , Reckers Derrick M , Wade Justin W , Sarkar Medha , Sarkar Nilanjan .

ABSTRACT

Full Text

The employment settings for autistic individuals in the USA is grim. As more children are diagnosed with ASD, the number of adolescent and young adult with ASD will increase as well over the next decade. Based on reports, one of the main challenges in securing and retaining employment for individual with ASD is difficulty in communicating and working with others in workplace settings. Most vocational trainings focused on technical skills development and very few addresses teamwork skills development. In this study, we present the design of a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) that support autistic individual to develop their teamwork skills by working together with a partner in a shared virtual space. This paper described the CVE architecture, teamwork-based tasks design and quantitative measures to evaluate teamwork skills. A system validation was also carried out to validate the system design. The results showed that our CVE was able to support multiple users in the same shared environment, the tasks were tolerable by users, and all the quantitative measures are recorded accordingly.