Design of an Assistive Avatar in Improving Eye Gaze Perception in Children with ASD During Virtual Interaction
AUTHORS
ABSTRACT
Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) usually experience impairment in social interaction and often display reduced gaze sharing when interacting with another person. The lack of gaze sharing or joint attention early in the children’s developmental stage may create a delay in their ability to learn new things and share information with others. The presented study involved the design of a novel virtual reality (VR)-based training game with an avatar and eye tracker aimed to eventually address the joint attention impairment in children with ASD. The assistive avatar provides necessary cues and hints based on both the eye tracking data recorded by the VR system and the task performance of the participant. The system uses the task performance to adaptively change the difficulty level of the game. We believe that the training game will be able to improve participant’s gaze following skill. A usability study was carried out to validate the system design. The result showed that the system was feasible and able to obtain the expected gaze performance from the participants. The details of the system architecture and result of system validation are presented in this paper.