The Role of Information and Computer Technology for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and the Facial Expression Wonderland (FEW)

Abstract

AbStrAct Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is one of the Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDDs). Significant deficitsin the children with ASD include lack of social communicationskills and cognitive dysfunction. This paper reviews and evaluates the influence of different kinds of InformationandComputer Technology (ICT) applications that facilitate intervention and training for children with ASD. This paper also presents a novel design prototype, Facial ExpressionWonderland(FEW), to train the children with ASD based on the progres-sive levels of training under a given background context. This prototype is designed to improve the ability of the ASD children in facial expression recognition. (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). In addition, most ASD children have certain ex-tent of mental retardation. Typically, in daily life these children lack social communication skills to interact with others and are often seen as social outcasts. For instance, ASD children, like most children, might not have eye contact with others during an inter-person conversa-tion. Others could misinterpret this manner as rude behavior when meeting these children for the first time. Additionally, they are highly