Assistive technologies can improve the quality of life of people diagnosed with different forms of social communication disorders. We report on the design and evaluation of an affective avatar aimed at engaging the user in a social interaction with the purpose of assisting in communication therapies. A human–avatar taxonomy is proposed to assist the design of affective avatars aimed at addressing social communication disorder. The avatar was evaluated with 30 subjects to assess how effectively it conveys the desired emotion and elicits empathy from the user. Results provide evidence that users become used to the avatar after a number of interactions, and they perceive the defined behavior as being logical. The users’ interactions with the avatar entail affective reactions, including the mimic emotions that users felt, and establish a preliminary ground truth about prototypic empathic interactions with avatars that is being used to train learning algorithms to support social communication disorder evaluation.

Nowadays diagnosis and treatment of cognitive and physical health issues can be empowered through the use of information technologies. However, there is a significant gap between the potential of those technologies and the real application. One example is the use of serious games with health proposals, a trending research area still not implanted in health systems. This paper proposes the use of serious games, particularly an interactive and affective avatar-based application to support the diagnosis and treatment of empathy and socialization issues, in an autonomous way through the implementation of a learning algorithm based on the ground truth obtained from the evaluation with real users, including normotypical users, users with Down syndrome and users with intellectual disability.