Achieving dialogue with children with severe autism in an adaptive multisensory interaction: the MEDIATE project

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive physical environment that allows children with severe autism to successfully interact with/nmultimodal stimuli, giving them a sense of control of the interaction and, hence, providing them with a sense of agency. This has been/nan extremely important effort for two main reasons: 1) This user group cannot be typified, hence making the design of an interactive/nsystem to fit all the spectrum of individuals a very complex task; 2) each individual PAS (Person on the Autistic Spectrum) user must be/nable to develop himself within the environment according to his own capacities and potentiality. Qualitative evaluation by psychologists/nshows very good results and sketches an encouraging future for research on these environments.