Developing an interactive social-emotional toolkit for autism spectrum disorders

A development process consisting of participatory design and iterative implementation was carried out to create a framework for interactive emotion-learning, the Interactive Social-Emotional Toolkit (iSET). iSET is a novel intervention consisting of live video recording and annotation software for use during social interactions as well as video review and discussion components. It is suitable for persons diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) including Autistic Disorder (AD) and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), the target groups for the intervention, as well as for persons with Asperger's Syndrome (AS). The iSET intervention was tested with a group of AD/PDD-NOS participants (n=20) with mean age 22.7 ± 8.55 years; these students were divided into an experimental group to test the iSET paradigm (n=10) and a control group following Golan and Baron-Cohen's Mind Reading DVD intervention approach (n=10). An age- and sex-matched group of neurotypical participants (n=20) were also tested with the pretest measures. Preliminary results show an increasing ability to use the iSET materials and to capture videos that neurotypical teachers considered "good examples" of emotions considered in the intervention.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Madsen, Miriam A

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rosalind Picard and Rana el Kaliouby.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62661

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/62661