Toward emotional interactive videogames for children with autism spectrum disorder

Technology and videogames have been proven as motivating tools for working attention and complex communication skills, especially in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this work, we present two experiences that used interactive games for promoting communication and attention. The first game considers emotions in order to measure children’s attention, concentration and satisfaction, while the second uses tangible tabletops for fostering cognitive planning. The analysis of the results obtained allows to propose a new study integrating both, in which the tangible interactive game is complemented with the emotional trainer in a way that allows identifying and classifying children’s emotion with ASD when they collaborate to solve cognitively significant and contextualized challenges. The first application proposed is an emotional trainer application in which the child can work out the seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise and neutral). Further, a serious videogame is proposed: a 3D maze where the emotions can be captured. The second case study was carried out in a Special Education Center, where a set of activities for working cognitive planning was proposed. In this case, a tangible interactive tabletop was used to analyze, in students with ASD, how the communication processes with these interfaces affect to the attention, memory, successive and simultaneous processing that compose cognitive planning from the PASS model. The results of the first study, suggest that the autistic children did not act with previous planning, but they used their perception to adjust their actions a posteriori (that explains the higher number of collisions). On the second case study, the successive processing was not explored. The inclusion of the mazes of case study 1 to a semantic rich scenario could allow us to measure the prior planning and the emotions involved in the maze game. The new physiological sensors will also help to validate the emotions felt by the children. The first study has as objective the capability to imitate emotions and resolve a maze without semantic context. The second study organized all the actions from a semantic context close to users. The attention results presented by the second study are coherent with the first study and complement it showing that attention can be receptive or selective. In the first study case, the receptive attention was the focus of analysis. In the second case, both contributed to explain and understand how it can be developed from a videogame.