Cognality VR: Exploring a Mobile VR App with Multiple Stakeholders to Reduce Meltdowns in Autistic Children

Many autistic children can have difficulty communicating, understanding others, and interacting with new and unfamiliar environments. At times they may suffer from a meltdown. The major contributing factor to meltdowns is sensory overwhelm. Technological solutions have shown promise in improving the quality of life for autistic children-however little exists to manage meltdowns. In this work with stakeholders, we design and deploy a low cost, mobile VR application to provide relief during sensory discomfort. Through the analysis of surveys from 88 stakeholders from a variety of groups (i.e., autistic adults, children with autism, parents of autistic individuals, and medical practitioners), we identified three key features regarding ways to manage meltdowns: escape, distract, and wait it out. These insights were implementation in a system, then was then remotely deployed with 6 families. Findings and future steps are discussed

Creating Social stories as wearable hyper-immersive virtual reality experiences for children with neurodevelopmental disorders

"Social stories" are short narratives that describe everyday life situations using paper or video and are widely used in interventions for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD), particularly in the Autistic Spectrum. Our research explores how to transform "traditional" social stories into wearable interactive immersive digital experiences. The paper describes a tool designed with therapists that enables everyone to autonomously develop and customize these "high tech" social stories, and, during a session of use, to control user's interaction and to automatically gather relevant behavioural information