An Assistive Augmented Reality-based Smartglasses Solution for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Acquiring daily living skills can be difficult for children and adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Increasing evidences indicate that classic occupational interventions approaches such as Discrete Trial Teaching(DTT) results to be boring and frustrating to individuals with ASD. As consequence, they spend most of the time off task and face difficulties to sustaining their selective attention. Moreover, in-person interventions are both costly and difficult to access. Evidence-based research shows that the use of augmented reality(AR) strengthens and attracts the attention of individuals with ASD, enhancing their engagement and user’s task performance. However, despite of the benefits, the use of AR as an assistive technology by this segment of population, still presents low rates of adaption. Platforms such as smartphone and tablet, used to run AR technologies provokes an head-down posture that decrease the user’s awareness to the physical environment putting themselves in risk of injury. Moreover, they are forced to have their hands occupied and most of the existent applications are lacks to be personalized to different user’s needs. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for developing real-time personalized assistive AR-based smartglasses system. The solution aims to solve the issues related to in-person occupational interventions i.e constant need for professional supervision during intervention as well as limited intervention duration and frequency. In addition, we also target issues related to classic AR-based platforms i.e head-down postures and task-specific design.