Developing a Software That Supports the Improvement of the Theory of Mind in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

• Main Authors: Roberto Munoz, Claudio Morales, Rodolfo Villarroel, Angeles Quezada, Victor Hugo C. De Albuquerque
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Autism spectrum disorders; mobile application; special needs; theory of mind; usability; education
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8594550/

The autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopment disorder that affects areas related to social skills, such as social interaction, communication, planning everyday activities, imagination, and creativity, in a permanent way and since early ages. These skills are very important for everyday routine and should be developed to improve the life quality and integrate people with such disorders in the workplace. Nowadays, there are several applications that were developed to support children with ASD. However, most of those applications were developed in other languages or are aimed at different social contexts. Some of them are simply outdated. Due to the mentioned factors, an application for mobile devices was developed, aimed at supporting professionals that intend to develop skills related to empathy based on the mind theory, in children diagnosed with ASD. In the tests with experts, it was possible to obtain an adequate application both in terms of content and usability for them, allowing the user to feel comfortable with the application and that this can be integrated into their activities without problems. Using the usability tests, the results show that both the users managed to complete the tasks with some time differences. The application was validated by performing several tests with experts and final users with promising results.