Section: New Results

Technological Support for Self-Regulation of Children with Autism

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties to self-regulate emotions, impeding their inclusion in a range of mainstreamed environments. Self-regulating emotions has been shown to require recognizing emotions and invoking specific coping strategies.

In the context of the School+ research project, we have developed an application dedicated to self-regulating emotions in children with ASD. Ten children with ASD have experimentally tested this tablet-based application over a period of three months in a mainstreamed school. A collaborative learning approach, involving parents, teachers and a school aid, was used 1) to train students to operate the tablet and our application autonomously, and 2) to facilitate the adoption of our intervention tool.

This study shows that our application was successful in enabling students with ASD to self-regulate their emotions in a school environment. Our application helped children with autism to recognize and name their emotions, and to regulate them using idiosyncratic, parent-child, coping strategies, supported by multimedia contents.

This work is in the context of the School+ national research project funded by the French Ministry of National Education.

A best paper award was obtained at ASSETS 2014 (The 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility) for this work in October 2014, by the 5 authors of the paper "Tablet-Based Activity Schedule for Children with Autism in Mainstream Environment" [26] : Charles Fage, Léonard Pommereau, Charles Consel, Emilie Balland, and Hélène Sauzéon.