Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is one of the fastest growing disorders around the world. The increasing rate of occurrence in Malaysia is estimated to occur in 1 of every 625 children and has since become a great concern to the community. Due to insufficient resources to cater for the autism education services, ineffective teaching strategy, and inadequate good positive behavioural support, this work is initiated as a means of solution to aid this issue. Findings of how a mobile games application, “Safe and Sound” featuring personalisation avatar can foster autistic children’s positive behaviour in social practices aspect are reported in this paper. Mobile game applications are used to trigger the children’s imagination for cognitive development as it is expected to become reliable to support content for the children to learn and apply in real situations. This analysis is entirely focused on interactions in schools by examining data from classroom activities. Three findings were revealed: (i) Personalised avatar can trigger children with ASD interest, (ii) Personalised avatar can promote emotions and feelings among children with ASD, and (iii) Avatar can facilitate social interaction among children with ASD. Thus, mobile games that incorporate personalised avatar can support children with ASD, especially to facilitate their positive behavioural skills.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge my faculty, Fakulti Teknologi Maklumat dan Komunikasi (FTMK) and express my deepest gratitude to the academic staff from The National Autism Society of Malaysia (NASOM Melaka) for their time and assistance in the trial process of this project. Not to forget, the participants who are involved and their willingness to take part in this project trial. The authors would also like to acknowledge Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM), Center for Advance Computing Technology (C-ACT), Specialists in Special Needs Awareness and Research (SPEAR) Group and Applied Oriented Research Grant (OARG)-PJP/2017/FTMK-CACT/S01567 for supporting and encouraging this research.
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Tan, S.W., Abdullah, M.H.L., Mohd Daud, N.F.N. (2019). Mobile Games for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to Support Positive Behavioural Skills. In: Piuri, V., Balas, V., Borah, S., Syed Ahmad, S. (eds) Intelligent and Interactive Computing. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 67. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6031-2_43
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