Virtual Visits

Autism is a complex neuro-developmental disorder that is seen in children from 18 months to 3 years of age. It affects the child?s communication, socialization and cognition. It is believed that if the children with autism receive early intervention they can improve remarkably. There are no reliable

Project Title

Virtual Visits

Project Area of Specialization

Augmented and Virtual Reality

Project Summary

Autism is a complex neuro-developmental disorder that is seen in children from 18 months to 3 years of age. It affects the child’s communication, socialization and cognition. It is believed that if the children with autism receive early intervention they can improve remarkably. There are no reliable data for the prevalence of autism in Pakistan. The statistics from South Asia estimate that there may be more than 350,000 children with autism in Pakistan. Most of these children remain undiagnosed. Unfortunately, the affected children have to bear the brunt of the disorder and are being mishandled due to lack of knowledge.

 Our project is to Aid autistic children during their therapies. It will make the daily therapy session process for Autistic children and their caretakers (therapists or their parents) easy and comfortable. A number of therapy sessions can be conducted in the Virtual Reality but right now our focus is to implement SST (Social Skills Therapy) and NET (Natural Environment Therapy). Different scenarios those, in real life, make Autistic children anxious and restless will be taken and implemented in virtual environment. The therapies implemented in VR will help them with social skills training and will manage behavioral symptoms in natural environments. As Autism is a spectrum disorder so the therapy session duration will be according to the child using it. It cannot be expected from them to learn and get used to the scenario in single session. The same session can be conducted again and again until the child is comfortable.

Project Objectives

Our Virtual reality application aims to minimize the effect of the real life situations on the autistic children by making them used to of the situation in the virtual world. They will be trained to be at ease in the actual situations. For example, if they are in a shopping mall, there will be a lot of things around them. They can get uncomfortable with any of it. It can be people, machinery, noise or music. In that case, their reaction to such a thing can be embarrassing for them. To save them from that trauma and the after affects of it, creating a virtual environment and making them used to what they’ll see or hear in the shopping mall will make the process easy for them. We will be doing it one step at a time according to the pace of the child. So, whatever their reaction will be, will be in the room, in front of a very few people.

Project Implementation Method

We plan to implement our application in the targeted resource centers initially. At those centers the children will have the facility to learn about the environments and overcome their anxiety while being in the safe surroundings. Eventually, the mobile application will be available for the parents and the therapists at different resource centers.

Benefits of the Project

With little knowledge about the autism spectrum disorder and very few centers in only the major cities of Pakistan it is hard for every parent to send their children to the autism resource centers for the therapy sessions either because of the accessibility or affordability. To facilitate them and the children, our application will make the therapies of the autism available for them and will prove to be helpful. It’s a onetime expense and they can perform the therapies whenever they want to. This way the children will be able to learn according to their ease, not according to the timings of the therapy sessions with the therapists.

Other than that, to perform these therapies at the resource centers an environment is created by using different tools to give the children an essence of what is it like in real. Then they are taken into the real environments which at times prove to be harmful for the children because their reactions are unpredictable when they face something new that they might not be comfortable with. This isn’t as effective as a virtual environment can be. Using the application they can first become aware of the environment completely. This will decrease the chances of children being apprehensive.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The therapies of our application will be built using 3D modeling softwares. We’ll be making the models in software and then combining them to create the scenario. Softwares like Unity3D, Blender and Visual Studio (for programming purpose) is being used to create the environment keeping in mind the details that are of critical importance to the autistic child.  Once the environment is created in the software, it will be converted to the android application. The phone will then be placed on the VR gear. The virtual environment will be observed by the user through virtual reality headset (or VR Gear). The VR gear will have a controller which will be in the hands of the caretaker. He will have the control of it so when to start, when to stop and which therapy to start will be done by him.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Type of Industry

IT , Health

Technologies

Augmented & Virtual Reality

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com