Tinyheroes - VR Therapeutic Game for Children with Autism Disabilities

• Main Author: Silva, Rafael Xavier Carvalho da
• Publication Date: 2024
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/11110/3011
• topic: Virtual Reality; Autism; Therapy; Serious Game

This dissertation explores the impact of virtual reality systems (VR) applied to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for rehabilitation. Recognized as neurological incapacity, the first symptoms appear at the beginning of childhood, threatening physical and mental disturbances. As a sensitive disorder, technology adapts together with "serious games" assisting in relearning skills and stimulating procedures about how to act, communicate, or behave without difficulties in unexpected environments. Following new technologies, specialists search to apply technology that allows economized time and development costs, in comparison to traditional methods and proportionate more authentic environment for children with autism. Due to technology limitations, previous studies mentioned restrictions of players related to manual control devices. Nowadays, recent VR devices can benefit from hand tracking features, providing a more precise position of the player’s hands, and enabling play without the manual controller device. In this work, the proposal is to concept one "serious games" and analyze the application of VR with HMD (head-mounted display) to proportionate an immersive experience and appeal to autistic children, acting on cognitive capabilities of attention and planning skills. The game has from the basis an environment of children tale’s where players interact with several characters in different scenarios. The game encounters are split into stages, where players are challenged to help characters arrive at their destination, unlocking, on the path, diverse mini-games. All interactions are performed through VR hand-tracking features. The evaluation is based on the gameplay experience with eight autistic children with functional capabilities (including non-verbal), aged between eight and sixteen years old. Later, and with help from specialists, external interventions were applied individually to fulfill two questionnaires. It was verified to have a positive impact on making the experience of the game more immersive, on self-efficiency, on cognitive skills and on self-determination of all players. The results reinforce the line of research dedicated to understanding technologies as therapeutic auxiliary tools for children with autism.