Title: Applied-behavioural analysis therapy for autism spectrum disorder students through virtual reality

Authors: T. Subetha; Kayal Padmanandam; L. Lakshmi; S.L. Aruna Rao

Addresses: Department of Information Technology, BVRIT HYDERABAD College of Engineering for Women, Hyderabad, India ' Department of Information Technology, BVRIT HYDERABAD College of Engineering for Women, Hyderabad, India ' Department of AI/ML, BVRIT HYDERABAD College of Engineering for Women, Hyderabad, India ' Department of Information Technology, BVRIT HYDERABAD College of Engineering for Women, Hyderabad, India

Abstract: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological disorder that contracts one's social engagements and suffers from mind blindness, leading to a lack of social-emotional reciprocity. The most unravelling solution for them to learn social behaviour is using interactive virtual reality technologies. This study aims to develop an applied behaviour analysis therapy through virtual reality (VR)-based training to learn the necessary social-communication skills. The proposed system consists of two sessions. First, the training session, where the students are trained with VR content, developed to exhibit social-communication skills. Next, the students enter the practice session where the student will be given a chance to practice the lessons taught during the training session. Student gestures are recognised using a multimodal gesture recognition system, and deep neural network is employed to identify the student's speech. The successful video snippets are stitched into a video using automatic video self-modelling (VSM) and it allows the learner to improve a particular target social behaviour. The system has been evaluated using a comparative study with and without the proposed study and the results evidence that students have improved learning and communication in the real world, which seems to be the dream of their parents and family.

Keywords: virtual reality; augmented reality; gesture detection; voice recognition; video self-modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCVR.2024.138307

International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, 2024 Vol.14 No.3, pp.233 - 249

Accepted: 22 Aug 2022
Published online: 01 May 2024 *

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