Dynamic gaze measurement with adaptive response technology in Virtual Reality based social communication for autism

Impairments in skills related to social communication are thought to be core deficits in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Specifically, these children demonstrate atypical viewing patterns in part characterized by greater fixation towards non-social objects than faces of individuals during social communication. Additionally, several assistive technologies, particularly Virtual Reality (VR), have been investigated to promote social interactions in this population. Thus given the promise of VR-based social interaction and atypicalities surrounding eye-gaze and social information processing characterizing ASD, in the current study, a novel technology was developed. This study combined social tasks presented in VR environment with a computationally-enhanced eye-tracker to provide individualized feedback. The developed system is capable of delivering individualized feedback based on a child's dynamic gaze patterns during VR-based social communication task. Result from a usability study with six adolescents with ASD demonstrate the technological capacity of such a system to adaptively respond and potentially modify aspects of behavioral viewing patterns (e.g., fixation counts, fixation duration, etc.) during VR-based social task.