Virtual reality for autism communication and education, with lessons for medical training simulators

This study is adapting Virtual Reality (VR) technologies to teach children with autism new coping skills that may then be generalized in their everyday lives. It helps to understand that children with autism are challenged by a sensory overload and by aversions to a variety of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli. In addition, their ability to attenuate and/or ignore these stimuli differs from that of the "typical" child. Therefore, our goals were to: 1. assess the potential of each of the children (both with and without verbal skills) for sustained interaction with task environments, 2. to identify which visual, auditory, and kinetic VR components would be attractive to our test group, 3. to identify each child's ability to attenuate and/or ignore a variety of distractors, and 4. to build new "pivotal behaviors" [2] for learning. These pivotal behaviors include: improvement of time-on-task, meaningful and consistent interaction with the real world, and screening out extraneous environmental stimuli. Our findings to date have been very encouraging, and we will continue to investigate the role of VR as a tool for generalized learning and the modification of pivotal behaviors. This ongoing study also provides technology transfer of communications applications from government, universities and businesses out into telemedicine and elementary schools.