Wearable assistive technologies for autism: opportunities and challenges

Esma Mansouri Benssassi, Juan-Carlos Gomez, LouAnne E. Boyd, Gillian R. Hayes, Juan Ye

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

42 Citations (Scopus)
54 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Autism is a lifelong developmental condition that affects how people perceive the world and interact with others. Challenges with typical social engagement, common in the autism experience, can have a significant negative impact on the quality of life of individuals and families living with autism. Recent advances in sensing, intelligent, and interactive technologies can enable new forms of assistive and augmentative technologies to support social interactions. However, researchers have not yet demonstrated effectiveness of these technologies in long-term real-world use. This paper presents an overview of social and sensory challenges of autism, which offer great opportunities and challenges for the design and development of assistive technologies. We review the existing work on developing wearable technologies for autism particularly to assist social interactions, analyse their potential and limitations, and discuss future research directions.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)11-21
JournalIEEE Pervasive Computing
Volume17
Issue number2
Early online date12 Jun 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2018

Keywords

  • Wearable technologies
  • Assistive technologies
  • Autism
  • Pervasive computing
  • Emotion detection
  • Disability study

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