An Analysis of the Evaluation Methods being Applied to Serious Games for Autistic Children

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5753/jis.2024.3288

Keywords:

Autism spectrum disorder, Serious game, Evaluation methods

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurodevelopment condition that significantly impacts social communication and interaction as well as behavior impairments, including restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. In recent years, numerous studies have proposed serious games as a way to aid in the therapy of children with ASD. Hence, it is crucial to evaluate the effectiveness of such games and obtain robust evidence of their positive influence on this type of treatment. In this study, we aim to explore the evaluation of games for autistic children by conducting a Systematic Literature Review. We analyze the methods utilized to evaluate these games, their application and combination, the quality aspects assessed, and the number and characteristics (e.g., age and special need) of the participants involved in the evaluation process. Furthermore, we present a compilation of the study findings for each evaluation method. Our findings reveal that there is no standardized methodology since different methods have been utilized and combined in various ways to evaluate serious games that support the treatment of ASD children. As contributions, this paper provides valuable insights into how serious games have been evaluated in this context and can be useful for researchers and game designers working in the field.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Al-Hammadi, M. and Abdelazim, A. (2015). Randomness impact in digital game-based learning. In 2015 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), pages 806–811. DOI: 10.1109/EDUCON.2015.7096064.

American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. American Psychiatric Association, Arlington, VA. DOI: 10.1176/appi.books.978089042559.

Aruanno, B., Garzotto, F., Torelli, E., and Vona, F. (2018). Hololearn: Wearable mixed reality for people with neurodevelopmental disorders (ndd). In Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS ’18, page 40–51, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3234695.3236351.

Barajas, A. O., Al Osman, H., and Shirmohammadi, S. (2017). A serious game for children with autism spectrum disorder as a tool for play therapy. In 2017 IEEE 5th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), pages 1–7. DOI: 10.1109/SeGAH.2017.7939266.

Bartoli, L., Garzotto, F., Gelsomini, M., Oliveto, L., and Valoriani, M. (2014). Designing and evaluating touchless playful interaction for asd children. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC ’14, page 17–26, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/2593968.2593976.

Boyd, L. E., Gupta, S., Vikmani, S. B., Gutierrez, C. M., Yang, J., Linstead, E., and Hayes, G. R. (2018). Vrsocial: Toward immersive therapeutic vr systems for children with autism. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’18, page 1–12, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173778.

Boyd, L. E., Ringland, K. E., Faucett, H., Hiniker, A., Klein, K., Patel, K., and Hayes, G. R. (2017). Evaluating an ipad game to address overselectivity in preliterate aac users with minimal verbal behavior. In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS ’17, page 240–249, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3132525.3132551.

Boyd, L. E., Ringland, K. E., Haimson, O. L., Fernandez, H., Bistarkey, M., and Hayes, G. R. (2015). Evaluating a collaborative ipad game’s impact on social relationships for children with autism spectrum disorder. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 7(1):1–18. DOI: 10.1145/2751564.

Buzzi, M. C., Paolini, G., Senette, C., Buzzi, M., and Paratore, M. T. (2019). Designing an accessible web app to teach piano to students with autism. In Proceedings of the 13th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter: Designing the next Interaction, CHItaly ’19, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3351995.3352037.

Calderón, A. and Ruiz, M. (2015). A systematic literature review on serious games evaluation: An application to software project management. Computers Education, 87:396–422. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.07.011.

Carlier, S., Van der Paelt, S., Ongenae, F., De Backere, F., and De Turck, F. (2019). Using a serious game to reduce stress and anxiety in children with autism spectrum disorder. In Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, PervasiveHealth’19, page 452–461, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3329189.3329237.

Carreño-León, M. A., Sandoval-Bringas, J. A., Encinas, I. D., Castro, R. C., Cota, I. E., and Carrillo, A. L. (2021). Managing emotions in autistic children through serious game with tangible interfaces. In 2021 4th International Conference on Inclusive Technology and Education (CONTIE), pages 126–133. DOI: 10.1109/CONTIE54684.2021.00029.

Carvalho, L. T. and da Cunha, M. X. C. (2019). Abc autism animals: An application to aid children with autism in learning (in portuguese. original title: Abc autismo animais: Um aplicativo para auxiliar a aprendizagem de crianças com autismo). Proceedings of Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames).

Chan, S., Cai, Y., Lu, A., Tun, N. Z., Huang, L., and Chandrasekaran, I. (2016). Virtual reality enhanced pink dolphin game for children with asd. In Proceedings of the 3rd Asia-Europe Symposium on Simulation & Serious Gaming, VRCAI ’16, page 215–218, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3014033.3014039.

Chen, C., Chander, A., and Uchino, K. (2019). Guided play: Digital sensing and coaching for stereotypical play behavior in children with autism. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI ’19, page 208–217, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3301275.3302309.

Cordeiro, R. F., Ferreira, W. S., Aguiar, Y. P. C., Saraiva, J.A. G., Tardif, C., and Galy, E. (2018). The brazilian challenge to accessibility and digital inclusion for people with autistic spectrum disorders. In Proceedings of the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, IHC 2018, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3274192.3274229.

Crovari, P., Gianotti, M., Riccardi, F., and Garzotto, F. (2019). Designing a smart toy: Guidelines from the experience with smart dolphin ”sam”. In Proceedings of the 13th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter: Designing the next Interaction, CHItaly ’19, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3351995.3352041.

Cunha, R. M. (2011). Development and evaluation of a computer game to teach vocabulary to children with autism (in portuguese. original title: Desenvolvimento e avaliação de um jogo de computador para ensino de vocabulário para crianças com autismo). Proceedings of Games for Change.

Dantas, A. C., de Melo, S., Neves, L., Milessi, T., and do Nascimento, M. Z. (2020). Michelzinho: Serious game to teach emotional skills to people with autism or intellectual disorder (in portuguese. original title: Michelzinho: Jogo sério para o ensino de habilidades emocionais em pessoas com autismo ou deficiência intelectual). In Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação-SBIE), volume 30, page 644. DOI: 10.5753/cbie.sbie.2019.644.

Dapogny, A., Grossard, C., Hun, S., Serret, S., Bourgeois, J., Jean-Marie, H., Foulon, P., Ding, H., Chen, L., Dubuisson, S., Grynszpan, O., Cohen, D., and Bailly, K. (2018). Jemime: A serious game to teach children with asd how to adequately produce facial expressions. In 2018 13th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face Gesture Recognition (FG 2018), pages 723–730. DOI: 10.1109/FG.2018.00114.

de Carvalho, A. P., Braz, C. S., dos Santos, S. M., Ferreira, R. A. C., and Prates, R. O. (2023). Serious games for children with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 0(0):1–28. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2023.2194051.

de Carvalho, A. P., Braz, C. S., and Prates, R. O. (2022). How are games for autistic children being evaluated? In Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, IHC ’22, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3554364.3559127.

de Souza, C. S. (2005). The Semiotic Engineering of Human-Computer Interaction. The MIT Press. DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/6175.001.0001.

Dragomir, M., Manches, A., Fletcher-Watson, S., and Pain, H. (2018). Facilitating pretend play in autistic children: Results from an augmented reality app evaluation. In Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS ’18, page 407–409, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3234695.3241020.

Duval, J., Rubin, Z., Segura, E. M., Friedman, N., Zlatanov, M., Yang, L., and Kurniawan, S. (2018). Spokeit: Building a mobile speech therapy experience. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Mobile-HCI ’18, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3229434.3229484.

Finkelstein, S., Barnes, T., Wartell, Z., and Suma, E. A. (2013). Evaluation of the exertion and motivation factors of a virtual reality exercise game for children with autism. In 2013 1st Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Assistive Technology (VAAT), pages 11–16. DOI: 10.1109/VAAT.2013.6786186.

Finkelstein, S., Nickel, A., Barnes, T., and Suma, E. A. (2010). Astrojumper: Motivating children with autism to exercise using a vr game. In CHI ’10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’10, page 4189–4194, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/1753846.1754124.

Frutos, M., Bustos, I., Zapirain, B. G., and Zorrilla, A. M. (2011). Computer game to learn and enhance speech problems for children with autism. In 2011 16th International Conference on Computer Games (CGAMES), pages 209– 216. DOI: 10.1109/CGAMES.2011.6000340.

Garcia-Garcia, J. M., Cabañero, M. d. M., Penichet, V. M. R., and Lozano, M. D. (2019). Emotea: Teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to identify and express emotions. In Proceedings of the XX International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Interacción ’19, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3335595.3335639.

Garzotto, F., Gelsomini, M., Oliveto, L., and Valoriani, M. (2014). Motion-based touchless interaction for asd children: A case study. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, AVI ’14, page 117–120, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/2598153.2598197.

Giacolini, L., Marti, P., and Iacono, I. (2015). Game of stimuli: An exploratory tangible interface designed for autism. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2015, ECCE ’15, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/2788412.2788444.

Giusti, L., Zancanaro, M., Gal, E., and Weiss, P. L. T. (2011). Dimensions of collaboration on a tabletop interface for children with autism spectrum disorder. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’11, page 3295–3304, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/1978942.1979431.

Glaser, N. and Schmidt, M. (2021). Systematic literature review of virtual reality intervention design patterns for individuals with autism spectrum disorders. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 38(8):1– 36. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2021.1970433.

Gobbo, M. R. d. M., de Barbosa, C. R. S. C., Morandini, M., and Mafort, F. (2019). Application for vocabulary gain and literacy aid aimed at children with autism spectrum disorder (in portuguese. original title: Aplicativo para ganho de vocabulário e auxílio na alfabetização destinado às crianças com transtorno do espectro autista). In Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação-SBIE), volume 30, page 1111. DOI: 10.5753/cbie.sbie.2019.1111.

Golestan, S., Mahmoudi-Nejad, A., and Moradi, H. (2019). A framework for easier designs: Augmented intelligence in serious games for cognitive development. IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, 8(1):19–24. DOI: 10.1109/MCE.2018.2867970.

Gomez, J., Jaccheri, L., Torrado, J. C., and Montoro, G. (2018). Leo con lula, introducing global reading methods to children with asd. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC ’18, page 420–426, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3202185.3202765.

Gotsis, M., Piggot, J., Hughes, D., and Stone, W. (2010). Smart-games: A video game intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC ’10, page 194–197, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/1810543.1810569.

Guerra, E. and Furtado, F. (2013). A proposal software for multidisciplinary treatment of autistic children. In 2013 8th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI), pages 1–6.

Harrold, N., Tan, C. T., Rosser, D., and Leong, T. W. (2014). Copyme: A portable real-time feedback expression recognition game for children. In CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’14, page 1195–1200, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/2559206.2581279.

Hassan, A., Pinkwart, N., and Shafi, M. (2021). Serious games to improve social and emotional intelligence in children with autism. Entertainment Computing, 38:100417. DOI: 10.1016/j.entcom.2021.100417.

Hassan, A. Z., Zahed, B. T., Zohora, F. T., Moosa, J. M., Salam, T., Rahman, M. M., Ferdous, H. S., and Ahmed, S. I. (2011). Developing the concept of money by interactive computer games for autistic children. In 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, pages 559–564. DOI: 10.1109/ISM.2011.99.

Hughes, D. E., Vasquez, E., and Nicsinger, E. (2016). Improving perspective taking and empathy in children with autism spectrum disorder. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), pages 1–5. DOI: 10.1109/SeGAH.2016.7586232.

Iyer, S., Mishra, R. S., Kulkami, S. P., and Kalbande, D. (2017). Assess autism level while playing games. In 2017 2nd International Conference on Communication Systems, Computing and IT Applications (CSCITA), pages 42–47. DOI: 10.1109/CSCITA.2017.8066573.

Jain, S., Tamersoy, B., Zhang, Y., Aggarwal, J. K., and Orvalho, V. (2012). An interactive game for teaching facial expressions to children with autism spectrum disorders. In 2012 5th International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing, pages 1–4. DOI: 10.1109/ISCCSP.2012.6217849.

Jouaiti, M. and Henaff, P. (2019). Robot-based motor rehabilitation in autism: a systematic review. International Journal of Social Robotics, 11(5):753–764. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-019-00598-9.

Kashani-Vahid, L., Mohajeri, M., Moradi, H., and Irani, A. (2018). Effectiveness of computer games of emotion regulation on social skills of children with intellectual disability. In 2018 2nd National and 1st International Digital Games Research Conference: Trends, Technologies, and Applications (DGRC), pages 46–50. DOI: 10.1109/DGRC.2018.8712024.

Khowaja, K., Banire, B., Al-Thani, D., Sqalli, M. T., Aqle, A., Shah, A., and Salim, S. S. (2020). Augmented reality for learning of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (asd): A systematic review. IEEE Access, 8:78779–78807. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2986608.

Kirst, S., Diehm, R., Bögl, K., Wilde-Etzold, S., Bach, C., Noterdaeme, M., Poustka, L., Ziegler, M., and Dziobek, I. (2022). Fostering socio-emotional competencies in children on the autism spectrum using a parent-assisted serious game: A multicenter randomized controlled trial. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 152:104068. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2022.104068.

Kitchenham, B. (2004). Procedures for performing systematic reviews. Technical Report TR/SE-0401 and NICTA Technical Report 0400011T.1, Keele University, Keele, U.K.

Koirala, A., Yu, Z., Schiltz, H., Van Hecke, A., Koth, K. A., and Zheng, Z. (2019). An exploration of using virtual reality to assess the sensory abnormalities in children with autism spectrum disorder. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC ’19, page 293–300, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3311927.3323118.

Kołakowska, A., Landowska, A., and Karpienko, K. (2017). Gyroscope-based game revealing progress of children with autism. In Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Machine Learning and Soft Computing, ICMLSC ’17, page 19–24, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3036290.3036324.

Kousar, S., Mehmood, N., and Ahmed, S. (2019). Serious games for autism children: A comparative study. University of Sindh Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 3(3):162–170.

Kurniawati, A., Kusumaningsih, A., and Hasan, I. (2019). Class vr: Learning class environment for special educational needs using virtual reality games. In 2019 International Conference on Computer Engineering, Network, and Intelligent Multimedia (CENIM), pages 1–5. DOI: 10.1109/CENIM48368.2019.8973353.

Li, B., Atyabi, A., Kim, M., Barney, E., Ahn, A. Y., Luo, Y., Aubertine, M., Corrigan, S., St. John, T., Wang, Q., Mademtzi, M., Best, M., and Shic, F. (2018). Social influences on executive functioning in autism: Design of a mobile gaming platform. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’18, page 1–13, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3174017.

Loiacono, T., Trabucchi, M., Messina, N., Matarazzo, V., Garzotto, F., and Beccaluva, E. A. (2018). Social matchup -: A memory-like virtual reality game for the enhancement of social skills in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’18, page 1–6, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3170427.3188525.

Maenner, M. J., Shaw, K. A., Bakian, A. V., Bilder, D. A., Durkin, M. S., Esler, A., Furnier, S. M., Hallas, L., HallLande, J., Hudson, A., Hughes, M. M., Patrick, M., Pierce, K., Poynter, J. N., Salinas, A., Shenouda, J., Vehorn, A., Warren, Z., Constantino, J. N., DiRienzo, M., Fitzgerald, R. T., Grzybowski, A., Spivey, M. H., Pettygrove, S., Zahorodny, W., Ali, A., Andrews, J. G., Baroud, T., Gutierrez, J., Hewitt, A., Lee, L.-C., Lopez, M., Mancilla, K. C., McArthur, D., Schwenk, Y. D., Washington, A., Williams, S., and Cogswell, M. E. (2021). Prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years — autism and developmental disabilities monitoring network, 11 sites, united states, 2018. Morbidity and mortality weekly report. Surveillance summaries (Washington, D.C.: 2002), 70(11):1—16. DOI: 10.15585/mmwr.ss7011a1.

Marchi, E., Schuller, B., Baird, A., Baron-Cohen, S., Lassalle, A., O’Reilly, H., Pigat, D., Robinson, P., Davies, I., Baltrušaitis, T., Adams, A., Mahmoud, M., Golan, O., Fridenson-Hayo, S., Tal, S., Newman, S., Meir-Goren, N., Camurri, A., Piana, S., Bölte, S., Sezgin, M., Alyuz, N., Rynkiewicz, A., and Baranger, A. (2019). The ASC-inclusion perceptual serious gaming platform for autistic children. IEEE Transactions on Games, 11(4):328–339. DOI: 10.1109/TG.2018.2864640.

Marques, A. B. and Monte, L. d. S. (2022). How are software technologies being evaluated with autistic users? a systematic mapping. Universal Access in the Information Society, 21:587–597. DOI: 10.1007/s10209-021-00794-3.

Marwecki, S., Rädle, R., and Reiterer, H. (2013). Encouraging collaboration in hybrid therapy games for autistic children. In CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’13, page 469–474, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/2468356.2468439.

Mei, C. and Guo, R. (2018). Enable an innovative prolonged exposure therapy of attention deficits on autism spectrum through adaptive virtual environments. In 2018 10th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games), pages 1–4. DOI: 10.1109/VS-Games.2018.8493421.

Mei, C., Zahed, B. T., Mason, L., and Ouarles, J. (2018). Towards joint attention training for children with asd - a vr game approach and eye gaze exploration. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pages 289–296. DOI: 10.1109/VR.2018.8446242.

Mir, H. Y. and Khosla, A. K. (2018). Kinect based game for improvement of sensory, motor and learning skills in autistic children. In 2018 Second International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems (ICICCS), pages 1670–1674. DOI: 10.1109/ICCONS.2018.8662894.

Moura, D., de Oliveira Filh, D. L. S., Laertius, D., Silva, A.J. G., Paiva, P., de Sales, T., Cavalcante, R., and Queiroz, F. (2016). Teo: An interactive game suite to support the treatment of children with autism (in portuguese. original title: Teo: Uma suíte de jogos interativos para apoio ao tratamento de crianças com autismo). In Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação-SBIE), volume 27, page 627. DOI: 10.5753/cbie.sbie.2016.627.

Neto, O. P. d. S., de Sousa, V. H. V., Batista, G. B., Santana, F. C. B. G., and Junior, J. M. B. O. (2013). G-tea: A tool to support learning for children with autism spectrum disorder, based on the aba methodology (in portuguese. original title: G-tea: Uma ferramenta no auxílio da aprendizagem de crianças com transtorno do espectro autista, baseada na metodologia aba). In Proceedings of Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames), pages 16–18.

Noor, H. A. M., Shahbodin, F., and Pee, N. C. (2012). Serious game for autism children: review of literature. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, 6(4):554–559. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1333272.

Parisa Ghanouni, Tal Jarus, J. G. Z. and Lucyshyn, J. (2021). An interactive serious game to target perspective taking skills among children with asd: A usability testing. Behaviour & Information Technology, 40(16):1716–1726. DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2020.1776770.

Petri, G. and Gresse von Wangenheim, C. (2017). How games for computing education are evaluated? a systematic literature review. Computers Education, 107:68–90. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.01.004.

Piana, S., Malagoli, C., Usai, M. C., and Camurri, A. (2019). Effects of computerized emotional training on children with high functioning autism. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 12(4):1045–1054. DOI: 10.1007/s10803019-04135-5.

Pistoljevic, N. and Hulusic, V. (2017). An interactive e-book with an educational game for children with developmental disorders: A pilot user study. In 2017 9th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games), pages 87–93. DOI: 10.1109/VSGAMES.2017.8056575.

Porayska-Pomsta, K., Alcorn, A. M., Avramides, K., Beale, S., Bernardini, S., Foster, M. E., Frauenberger, C., Good, J., Guldberg, K., Keay-Bright, W., Kossyvaki, L., Lemon, O., Mademtzi, M., Menzies, R., Pain, H., Rajendran, G., Waller, A., Wass, S., and Smith, T. J. (2018). Blending human and artificial intelligence to support autistic children’s social communication skills. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact., 25(6):1–35. DOI: 10.1145/3271484.

Rahman, M. M., Ferdous, S., and Ahmed, S. I. (2010). Increasing intelligibility in the speech of the autistic children by an interactive computer game. In 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, pages 383–387. DOI: 10.1109/ISM.2010.64.

Rapela, J., Lin, T.-Y., Westerfield, M., Jung, T.-P., and Townsend, J. (2012). Assisting autistic children with wireless eog technology. In 2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages 3504–3506. DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2012.6346721.

Ribeiro, P. C., Baere Pederassi Lomba de Araujo, B., and Raposo, A. (2014). Comfim: A cooperative serious game to encourage the development of communicative skills between children with autism. In 2014 Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment, pages 148–157. DOI: 10.1109/SBGAMES.2014.19.

Ringland, K. E., Wolf, C. T., Boyd, L., Brown, J. K., Palermo, A., Lakes, K., and Hayes, G. R. (2019). Dancecraft: A whole-body interactive system for children with autism. In Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS ’19, page 572–574, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3308561.3354604.

Ritterfeld, U., Cody, M., and Vorderer, P. (2009). Serious games: Mechanisms and effects. Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/978020389165.

Rodrigues, J. H., Silva, L., and Bellon, O. R. P. (2018). Transferring facial expression to animated avatars: Assisting children with autism spectrum disorder (in portuguese. original title: Transferência de expressão facial para avatares animados: Auxiliando crianças com transtorno do espectro autista). XVII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames).

Rouhi, A., Spitale, M., Catania, F., Cosentino, G., Gelsomini, M., and Garzotto, F. (2019). Emotify: Emotional game for children with autism spectrum disorder based-on machine learning. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces: Companion, IUI ’19, page 31–32, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3308557.3308688.

Sharma, S., Varkey, B., Achary, K., Hakulinen, J., Turunen, M., Heimonen, T., Srivastava, S., and Rajput, N. (2018). Designing gesture-based applications for individuals with developmental disabilities: guidelines from user studies in india. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 11(1):1–27. DOI: 10.1145/3161710.

Silva, G. F. M. and Raposo, A. B. (2016). Identifying awareness requirements in face-to-face collaborative applications for users with autism spectrum disorders. In Anais do XIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Colaborativos, pages 61–75. SBC. DOI: 10.5753/sbsc.2016.9492.

Silva, G. M., Souto, J. J. d. S., Fernandes, T. P., Bolis, I., and Santos, N. A. (2021). Interventions with serious games and entertainment games in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review. Developmental Neuropsychology, 46(7):463–485. PMID: 34595981. DOI: 10.1080/87565641.2021.1981905.

Silva-Calpa, G. F. M., Raposo, A. B., and Suplino, M. (2018). Coasd: A tabletop game to support the collaborative work of users with autism spectrum disorder. In 2018 IEEE 6th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), pages 1–8. DOI: 10.1109/SeGAH.2018.8401358.

Sousa, F. R. M., Costa, E. A. B., and de Castro, T. H. C. (2012). Worldtour: Software to support teaching of autistic children (in portuguese. original title: Worldtour: Software para suporte no ensino de crianças autistas). In Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação-SBIE), volume 23.

Soysa, A. I. and Al Mahmud, A. (2020). Tangible play and children with asd in low-resource countries: A case study. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, TEI ’20, page 219–225, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3374920.3374951.

Spitale, M., Gelsomini, M., Beccaluva, E., Viola, L., and Garzotto, F. (2019). Meeting the needs of people with neuro-developmental disorder through a phygital approach. In Proceedings of the 13th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter: Designing the next Interaction, CHItaly ’19, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3351995.3352055.

Sturm, D., Peppe, E., and Ploog, B. (2016). emotican: Design of an assessment game for emotion recognition in players with autism. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), pages 1–7. DOI: 10.1109/SeGAH.2016.7586228.

Sukiennik, R., Marchezan, J., and Scornavacca, F. (2021). Challenges on diagnosing autism spectrum disorder in brazil: a country as big as the social differences it presents. Frontiers in Neurology, 12:1010. DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2021.598073.

Susi, T., Johannesson, M., and Backlund, P. (2007). Serious games: An overview. Technical Report HS-IKI-TR07-001, University of Skövde, School of Humanities and Informatics.

Thordarson, A. and Vilhjálmsson, H. H. (2019). Socuevr: Virtual reality game for social cue detection training. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA ’19, page 46–48, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3308532.3329440.

Tsikinas, S. and Xinogalos, S. (2019). Studying the effects of computer serious games on people with intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder: A systematic literature review. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 35(1):61–73. DOI: 10.1111/jcal.12311.

Tsikinas, S., Xinogalos, S., and Satratzemi, M. (2016). Review on serious games for people with intellectual disabilities and autism. Proceedings of the European Conference on Games-based Learning, 2016-January:696–703.

Uzuegbunam, N., Wong, W.-H., Cheung, S.-c. S., and Ruble, L. (2015). Mebook: Kinect-based self-modeling intervention for children with autism. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), pages 1–6. DOI: 10.1109/ICME.2015.7177518.

Vallefuoco, E., Bravaccio, C., Gison, G., and Pepino, A. (2021). Design of a serious game for enhancing money use in teens with autism spectrum disorder. In De Paolis, L. T., Arpaia, P., and Bourdot, P., editors, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics, pages 339–347, Cham. Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-87595-425.

Virnes, M., Kärnä, E., and Vellonen, V. (2015). Review of Research on Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and the Use of Technology. Journal of Special Education Technology, 30(1):13–27. DOI: 10.1177/016264341503000102.

Wade, J., Sarkar, A., Swanson, A., Weitlauf, A., Warren, Z., and Sarkar, N. (2017). Process measures of dyadic collaborative interaction for social skills intervention in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 10(4):1–19. DOI: 10.1145/3107925.

Weilun, L., Elara, M. R., and Garcia, E. M. A. (2011). Virtual game approach for rehabilitation in autistic children. In 2011 8th International Conference on Information, Communications Signal Processing, pages 1–6. DOI: 10.1109/ICICS.2011.6174256.

Xianmei, L. (2017). A review of somatic games intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Exceptional People, 2(11):83. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1333272.

Yanez-Gomez, R., Cascado-Caballero, D., and Sevillano, J.-L. (2017). Academic methods for usability evaluation of serious games: a systematic review. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 76(4):5755–5784. DOI: 10.1007/s11042-016-3845-9.

Zakari, H. M., Ma, M., and Simmons, D. (2014). A review of serious games for children with autism spectrum disorders (asd). In Ma, M., Oliveira, M. F., and Baalsrud Hauge, J., editors, Serious Games Development and Applications, pages 93–106, Cham. Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-11623-59.

Zhang, L., Fu, Q., Swanson, A., Weitlauf, A., Warren, Z., and Sarkar, N. (2018). Design and evaluation of a collaborative virtual environment (comove) for autism spectrum disorder intervention. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 11(2):1–22. DOI: 10.1145/3209687.

Zhao, H., Swanson, A. R., Weitlauf, A. S., Warren, Z. E., and Sarkar, N. (2018). Hand-in-hand: A communication-enhancement collaborative virtual reality system for promoting social interaction in children with autism spectrum disorders. IEEE transactions on human-machine systems,48(2):136–148. DOI: 10.1109/THMS.2018.2791562.

Downloads

Published

2024-01-01

How to Cite

CARVALHO, A. P. de; BRAZ, C. S.; PRATES, R. O. An Analysis of the Evaluation Methods being Applied to Serious Games for Autistic Children. Journal on Interactive Systems, Porto Alegre, RS, v. 15, n. 1, p. 55–78, 2024. DOI: 10.5753/jis.2024.3288. Disponível em: https://journals-sol.sbc.org.br/index.php/jis/article/view/3288. Acesso em: 13 oct. 2024.

Issue

Section

Regular Paper

Most read articles by the same author(s)