Ana Matos

Principal Researcher:
Valter Alves
Duration: 2019 – 2022

Cised team members
Valter Alves
Rui Pedro Duarte
Frederico Fonseca
Ana Cristina Bico Matos

Funding
CGD; PV

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects sensory processing, conditioning development of communication skills, and social interaction. Still, there are few digital tools explicitly aiming at the study this hindrance. It is well known that children with ASD are fond of technologies and videogames in particular. The predictable and constant behaviour of technological components, the visual appeal, and the challenges are often highly appreciated. Besides, videogames typically allow users to play alone, which is adequate to the profile of such an audience. The use of videogames by autistics has shown to be relevant, and studies are evidencing a correlation with superior cognitive development. Even so, existing solutions that were specifically developed for this audience have assumedly pedagogical goals, which systematically compromises their ludic dimension. In contrast, the present proposal focuses on pure playfulness and is designed to provide an advantage to players who adopt specific strategies that rely on communicating with other users. Also instrumental to the project, different scenarios are designed so that researchers can observe and collect scientific data, aiming at better understanding the related disturbances. To begin with, such scenarios support the analysis of the influence of physical proximity between the players, their prior level of familiarity, and their relative communicational abilities. Secondly, researchers will study the impact of repeating the experience, both in terms of in-game performance and regarding a possible contribution to the relationship between participants and, eventually, with third parties. It is also an objective to verify how the use of immersive virtual reality systems can impact the results in different scenarios.
The development of the videogame will resort to agile methodologies, which will allow for an incremental production, supported by recurrent tests and consistently validated according to the intended objectives. The partners in this project grant that a considerable number of users will be available both during the videogame development process and the experiments, which is highly relevant for the scientific representativeness of the observations and results.