Do Children in the Spectrum of Autism Interact with Real-time Emotionally Expressive Human Controlled Avatars?

Children in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by impairments in social skills and they usually face difficulties in recognizing facial emotion expressions. Early intervention and treatment is of major concern and therefore a number of detection and teaching methods have been developed, including the use of ICT. This article presents a brief but extensive literature review on the way tutors are represented in digital environments. The results showed that there is a need for further investigation on the effectiveness of the methods used for the interaction of children on ASD with technology tools, as well as on knowledge transfer. Since there is a lack of empirical data concerning the preference of different interaction modalities by children with ASD, this article also reports on an exploratory study conducted to investigate the acceptance and preference of three different real-time modalities used in facial emotion recognition by two children with ASD (low and high functioning autism). The results indicated a discrepancy between the two children which can be mainly attributed to the differences accompanied the categorization of children with ASD in low and high functioning autism.