Gary Bishop » Autism

Desensitizing kids with autism to stressful experiences with VR

gb — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:41:23 +0000

Karen suggests it might be useful to develop VR scenarios to help kids become accustomed to normally stressful audio over stimulation without the added social burden of having to deal with people at the same time. For example, many kids can’t go to the movie theater because the THX sound thing at the beginning overwhelms them. If they could experience that THX sound in a controlled environment with gradually increasing volume it might not be so bad when it happened at the theater.

Lots of other situations could be handled similarly.

Helping kids with autism read faces

gb — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:37:18 +0000

Another neat idea from Karen. There have been some news stories about a DVD that helps kids with autism learn to read faces and emotions. It would be cool to do a version which allows folks to upload their own pictures and which presents the faces in an interactive web site.

Speech Game Idea

gb — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:26:12 +0000

Michael sent email saying

My friend Michelle’s son Alex is autistic. We visited them on Saturday night. While Michelle and the rest of us were doing whatever, Alex was playing with an R2D2 toy.

This toy performs actions based on speech recognition.

Alex: “Hey R2″
R2: affirmative beep (sounds like “Boo-Boop”)
Alex: “Do yamgine?”
R2: negative beep (sounds like “Bee-Bawp”)
Alex: “Do you ‘magine?”
R2: negative beep
Michelle: “Do you remember?”
R2: affirmative beep
Michelle: “Darth Vader?”
R2: scared noise and shaking head and moving in circles (sounds like “wa-a-a-hoo!”)

REPEAT w/o michelle for like an hour

the kid was HIGHLY motivated to say the right stuff, and kept at it.

what if there was a web framework (through flash or silverlight?) and a teacher could program in like the vocab, and a storyline (maybe somehting like tarheel reader could help create some default storylines (TANGENT: we should try to have some of your projects seed other as possible) and then the kid tries to say it, this would be for kids with speech issues.

maybe the kid’s a detective, and has to go around quesitoning people, maybe at first it acknowledges bits and pieces (i.e.”Hey ” “where were you?” “?”) then later it only acknowledges at the end

maybe how tolerant it is of sound deviating depends on the kid’s level and their recent success rate…

I love it! This could make a very interesting student project and would take our work in a different and exciting direction.

Autism in Girls

gb — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:53:00 +0000

What Autistic girls are made of by Emily Bazelon is an interesting read.

When Engineers’ Genes Collide

gb — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 17:21:12 +0000

By Philip E. Ross

Could modern patterns of marriage be concentrating the genes that predispose people to autism?