Limited studies exist that explore motionbased touchless applications for children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and investigate their design issues and the benefits they can bring to this target group. The paper reports a structured set of design guidelines that distill our experience gained from empirical studies and collaborations with therapeutic centers. These heuristics informed the design of three touchless games that were evaluated in a controlled study involving medium functioning ASD children at a therapeutic center. Our findings confirm the potential of motionbased touchless applications games for technologyenhanced interventions for this target group.

While there has been a growing body of work in child-robot interaction, we still have very little knowledge regarding young children's speaking and listening dynamics and how a robot companion should decode these behaviors and encode its own in a way children can understand. In developing a backchannel prediction model based on observed nonverbal behaviors of 4-6 year-old children, we investigate the effects of an attentive listening robot on a child's storytelling. We provide an extensive analysis of young children's nonverbal behavior with respect to how they encode and decode listener responses and speaker cues. Through a collected video corpus of peer-to-peer storytelling interactions, we identify attention-related listener behaviors as well as speaker cues that prompt opportunities for listener backchannels. Based on our findings, we developed a backchannel opportunity prediction (BOP) model that detects four main speaker cue events based on prosodic features in a child's speech. This rule-based model is capable of accurately predicting backchanneling opportunities in our corpora. We further evaluate this model in a human-subjects experiment where children told stories to an audience of two robots, each with a different backchanneling strategy. We find that our BOP model produces contingent backchannel responses that conveys an increased perception of an attentive listener, and children prefer telling stories to the BOP model robot.

Our research explores the potential of Wearable Immersive Virtual Reality (WIVR) as learning tool for children with disability, particularly Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDDs). NDD is characterized by severe and often co-existing deficits in the cognitive, emotional, and motor areas. The paper discusses the learning potential of WIVR and presents the design and preliminary evaluation of Wildcard, a novel WIVR system designed in cooperation with NDD specialists. Virtual environments are displayed on a smartphone placed inside a commercial low cost VR viewer while children interact with the virtual world through gaze focus and direction. An exploratory study performed at a care center sheds a light on the behavior of children with NDDs in wearable immersive virtual reality environments and highlights the learning potential as well as the possible difficulties of using this technology with this target group

We report on a nine-month-long observational study with teachers and students with autism in a classroom setting. We explore the impact of motion-based activities on students' behavior. In particular, we examine how the playful gaming activity impacted students' engagement, peer-directed social behaviors, and motor skills. We document the effectiveness of a collaborative game in supporting initiation of social activities between peers, and in eliciting novel body movements that students were not observed to produce outside of game play. We further identify the positive impact of game play on overall classroom engagement. This includes an "audience effect" whereby non-playing peers direct initiations to those playing the game and vice versa, and a positive "spillover" effect of the activity on students' social behavior outside of game play. We identify key considerations for designing and deploying motion-based activities for children with autism in a classroom setting. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s)

The Magic Room is a smart space for use by children with neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) and their caregivers designed in cooperation with NDD specialists and currently deployed at two therapeutic centers in Italy. It supports multimodal embodied interaction by providing controllable stimuli to the vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile sensory systems through ambient sound and visual projections, soap bubbles, aromas, lights, toys and other physical objects. Results of an exploratory study involving 8 caregivers and 19 children with severe NDD impairments who used the Magic Room for four months are encouraging and might pave the way for new research and inspire novel interventions in this area.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of IMAGINE, a novel interactive immersive smart space for embodied learning. In IMAGINE children use full-body movements and gestures to interact with multimedia educational contents projected on the wall and on the floor, while synchronized light effects enhance immersivity. A controlled study performed at a primary school with 48 children aged 6-8 highlights the educational potential of an immersive embodied solution, also compared to traditional teaching methods, and draws some implications for smart-space technology adoption in educational contexts.