Neurohab: A Platform for Virtual Training of Daily Living Skills in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Authors

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that besides the core symptoms of impairment in communication, social interaction and repetitive behaviour, seriously compromises adaptive functioning limiting social inclusion. A number of studies also support executive dysfunction in ASD, although its specificity remains controversial. Furthermore, recent studies point to the relevance of ecologically valid executive tasks that match patient's daily lives and therefore address the correlation with social cognition and learning of adaptive behaviour. These disabilities are usually addressed in rehabilitation therapies, usually performed in a scheme of one therapist for individual, having high costs for the individuals and patient associations in human resources. This usually results in lesser hours of intervention, leading to lesser impact of the behaviour training. To avoid this impact, some technological responses have been arising in the literature to perform training of individuals with ASD, although lacking scientific validity. In this work, we propose a platform for training daily activities in controlled environments, which allow caregivers and therapists to follow the patients' performances and improvements along the time. This platform contains several serious games, which target specific adaptive and executive dysfunctions. Games can be added to the platform and become automatically available for the users.

Keywords

Autism spectrum disorder,daily living skills,virtual rehabilitation

Conference

HCist - International conference on health and social care information systems and technologies 2014

DOI