Design of a Computer-Assisted System for Teaching Attentional Skills to Toddlers with ASD

Attentional skill, which is considered as one of the fundamental elements of social communication, is among the core areas of impairment among children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In recent years, technology-assisted ASD intervention has gained momentum among researchers due its potential advantages in terms of flexibility, accessibility and cost. In this paper, we proposed a computer-assisted system for teaching attentional skills to toddlers with ASD, using the “response to name” skill as a specific example. The system was a fully closed-loop autonomous system capable of both providing name prompting from different locations of a room and detecting the child’s attention in response to his name prompt. A preliminary user study was conducted to validate the proposed system and the protocol. The results showed that the proposed system and the protocol were well tolerated and were engaging for the participants, and were successful in eliciting the desired performance from the participants.