Wearables and mobile technologies in Autism Spectrum Disorder interventions: A systematic literature review

Background: Nowadays, in the Internet of Things era, wearables, mobile technologies and enhanced communication and computing capabilities has led to the upsurge of innovative mobile health solutions. Many research efforts have taken place recently in the domain of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Method: The current paper presents a thorough review of the literature on the use of wearables and mobile technologies for ASD-related interventions. It intends to give insights and guidelines to researchers in order to develop more useful and closer to market products. Results: We searched seven databases for research articles published after 2000. Of 4,722 articles initially retrieved, only 83 papers met the inclusion criteria. Several challenges still exist in the research efforts towards the development of applications exploiting the latest wearables and mobile technologies for ASD interventions: small number of participants in the studies, non generalizable results, technology considerations, privacy, legal and ethical issues, etc. Subjective assessment is also another significant barrier for further adoption of the developed solutions. Conclusions: The findings support the notion that this is a very promising sector which is expected to undergo an important increase in the coming years. There is a great need for highly customizable solutions. In parallel, researchers should focus on the importance of developing applications for the real world and not only for controlled environments. Further studies employing artificial intelligence and affective computing are needed to support both diagnosis and therapeutic interventions as well.