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Serious Games Assisted By Playware As A Way To Improve Socio-Emotional Skills In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Authors:
José Azevedo
Vinicius Silva
Filomena Soares
João Sena Esteves
Ana Paula Pereira

Keywords: Serious Games; Playware; Autism Spectrum Disorder; Emotions

Abstract:
This paper presents a project developed with the aim of promoting emotional skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The project involves a serious game and a playware object, which is a physical component that allows the user to interactively play the serious game. The playware object has six buttons, each one showing an emoji with a specific facial expression and communicates via Bluetooth with the serious game app installed in an Android device. The facial expressions used are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and neutral/normal. They were applied to the three game activities (imitation, recognition and storytelling). The chain of tests started with an online questionnaire to validate the avatars created to represent the previously mentioned facial expressions in the game, which was followed by a usability test of the application (serious game and playware object) with six typically developing children. Finally, the three game activities were tested with six children with ASD in three/four sessions. Due to the small test group and reduced number of sessions, the primary objective was to assess if the target group accepted the application. In fact, it had a high level of approval regarding both the serious game and the playware object.

Pages: 158 to 163

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: September 16, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3514

ISBN: 978-1-61208-660-6

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from September 16, 2018 to September 20, 2018