User-tuned Content Customization for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a triad of disturbances affecting the areas of communication, social interaction and behavior, and each subject has very different cognitive and functional characteristics. Especially at young ages and in educational contexts, these limitations can be deeply disabling if appropriate intervention methodologies are not used. Computer aided tools play a major role in the development of adequate educational responses, however, current approaches either focus more on the delivery of rich multimedia content, and less on the customization capabilities, or vice versa, and are unable to explore the individual differences that are specific to each subject with ASD. This work presents a novel approach focused on improving the outcomes of children with ASD, with a special emphasis on communication skills, by exploring the potential of user-tuned content customization to enable children to interact and share opinions and experiences, through a rich multimedia environment. Our approach was evaluated through a set of transversal and longitudinal studies involving real-world users. In the overall, experimental results have shown that our proposed approach leads to improved outcomes and higher engagement of the children in the educational process. c © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Scientific Programme Committee of the 5th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI 2013).